#just saying the commission has the power to produce a body double
Note
Prompt idea that I sincerely don't know anywhere else to put out, but what if, one mother of the seven like... delayed giving up the baby idk why, but like, in the end the child goes to the academy, but like... they know the world outside this mansion full of all sorts of abuse and violence, and so is trying to bring good sense and awareness to all of other children somehow, even though like... you don't know very much or correctly the things in general, but is trying anyway because yeah
okay okay i will bite
it's gonna be Five bc u know how I roll by now and you didn't specify a child, so this is a non-twin world uwu
I see some people naming him Fievel so we're gonna have to go with that, nicknamed Five by the other kids who thought it was absolutely hilarious to ask "which one?" whenever Reginald snaps “Five!”
Though officially, of course, Five is number seven.
So Fievel is born in a park to a mother who was never prepared to have achild, but held him in the hospital and looked into the eyes of a man offering her money for her newborn and she says - no.
Because she’s poor, yes, and she’s working two jobs to make ends meet, and this man might be able to provide for her child but - she doesn’t like the fact that he offered her money. As though he could place a price on a human life.
(His stupid mustache might have played a role as well. Bastard.)
So she keeps little Fievel, and it’s hard. It’s so hard. Babies are expensive, and she was barely making enough as it was, but her best friend works from home and offers to take him sometimes during the day instead of a more expensive daycare. Some of her other friends ask around relatives and friends and hunt through garage sales until she has a passable amount of baby items.
It would be easier if Fievel wasn’t such a precocious child. He’s curious and into everything, a loud baby that demands attention.
“C’mon Fi,” She begs her three-year-old son from where she’s draped across the sofa. Aren’t kids supposed to sleep a lot? Why did she end up with the one kid in the world who is on the go twenty four seven? “Can we please take a nap?”
“No.” Fievel says with a mulish look in his eyes and he shoves a book towards her face and almost takes her eye out with a corner of it, “Wead to me.”
And she sighs, and she’s so tired, but she hauls herself up and pats the sofa next to her and her little boy beams at her with such - such love that it almost takes her breath away. “Dogger, again? How many times have we read this?”
Fievel kicks at her with his little soft foot, and she catches it in a hand and smiles and she drops the book in her lap to bring her other hard over to dust feather light fingertips against her baby’s sides.
He’s terribly ticklish and giggles even as he shrieks “NO” loud enough that their neighbors will probably complain to her about it again. But in that moment she doesn’t care as she brings her head down to blow raspberries on her son’s stomach and make him laugh.
She loves him so much.
(But she never has any time. Her friendships are more distant now, because she’s either at work or spending time with her son. She’s always exhausted because she works such long hours and Fievel keeps her awake when she’s a home. She doesn’t blame him, he didn’t ask to be born into the world any more than she asked for him, really. But it’s hard.)
Fievel is a curious child. She takes him to children’s museums and zoos on the discount days and watches him run around with seemingly endless energy. She has to keep a careful eye on him otherwise he will disappear, get distracted and wander off no matter how many times she’s tried to tell him to never do so.
Then he turns four.
Her baby is so smart. And he’s restless. And even though the place she works has a daycare through them, the people there are one incident away from banning Fievel. She thinks that’s dumb, considering they’re the ones that didn’t watch Fievel closely enough and lost him almost four times in recent months.
So she signs him up for preschool.
She gets him a brand new outfit for the day, fussing over him until he’s all squirmy and pouty and slapping her hands away with all the grump that a four-year-old can muster.
She sends him off to daycare with ruffled hair and a wide smile and tries not to worry too much.
She’s at work when she gets a call from the school informing her that they’ve lost her son. She hurriedly lets her boss know and sweeps out of work without a backwards glance, showing up at the school just as her phone rings again and a flustered individual informs her that they’ve located him.
“I have no idea how he got out.” The frazzled teacher looks close to tears when she meets with the poor woman, giving Fievel a fierce look that promises that they will be having a talk about this.
“I din’t do anything.” Fievel pipes up mulishly, “I didn’t go nowhere, the class did.”
She pinches the bridge of her nose, and faces the teacher apologetically. After a pointed comment from a friend, she’s been vaguely looking into ADHD since her kid is like this, “I’ll have a talk with him.”
“I’ll - I’ll make sure to keep a better eye on him.” The woman looks floored that she isn’t tearing strips out of the school administration for losing her toddler. Actually when it’s phrased like that she probably should be more pissed off. But she also knows her kid and what a handful her is.
So she takes him home and sits him down.
“This can’t happen again, Fi.” She tells him, and he’s got his little arms crossed and he’s pouting with his entire body. “I mean it. I had to leave work, and you know I have to work.”
“You don’t hafta.” Fievel says harshly, “What about me?”
She sits on the couch next to him, heart heavy, “Baby, you know I have to work so that we can have things and go places.”
Her son scrabbles up on his knees and puts his hand on her arms and gives her big eyes, “I don’t need lotsa toys. An’ we don’t hafta go to the zoo.”
“Oh baby,” She pulls him into her arms and lets him snuggle into her, “I gotta work. And you gotta go to school and be good. Okay? You can’t be leaving the classroom again.”
“I din’t mean to.” Fievel sniffles, and she hugs him just a little tighter as the tears start to flow.
“It’s okay.” She murmurs into his hair, “I got you.”
To his credit, Fievel does his best. He still manages to leave the classroom somehow, seemingly whenever the teacher is looking away. No one seems to know how he does it. Emma who sits next to him exclaims that he just vanished like he went BAM and wasn’t there all of a sudden!
(Oh, the imagination of four-year-olds, the teacher thinks to herself.)
But whenever he does he seems to come back within fifteen to thirty minutes. Sometimes the teacher doesn’t even notice he’s gone before he’s knocking on the (locked) classroom door to be let back in. They don’t call his mother about the incidents anymore and the teachers nickname him Houdini with a sort of despair.
Fievel is four-and-a-half when he’s taking a walk with his mother down to the park. He’s got his little rainboots on because he always wades into the pond and he likes the slosh of the water on his feet when it goes over the top, and his little duck shirt. He’s making loud quacking noises which don’t actually sound anything like a duck but when he looks at her for approval she nods with a smile.
They’re crossing the road at the crosswalk, holding hands because they always do, when the car comes careening around the corner.
She can’t react in time, eyes widening and she’s hollering and she moves to push her son and she only has eyes for him as she places her body between him and the car and -
She watches his eyes go wide and afraid and she
watches
him
disappear
and then the car clips her and she’s sent sprawling and that’s the last thing she remembers.
She wakes up in the hospital hours later with a concussion, a broken arm, several broken ribs, and a lots of scrapes. She’s lucky, they tell her. She demands to know where her son is.
Hours later, when she’s worked herself up into a right tizzy, her son sprints into the room followed shortly by some very harried looking cops and she has to haul him into the bed so that he doesn’t hurt himself getting up.
“Gentle, gentle.” She warms him, wincing when he bangs a knee into her bad ribs, “I’m a little tender at the moment, baby.”
“You got hurt!” Fievel yells at the tops of his lungs and then immediately bursts into loud and terrified tears. So she ignores her bad ribs and messed up arm and cradles him close to her making shushing noises and stroking his back until he’s cried himself out and drops off right there in the hospital bed.
She gets out of the hospital with a cast and a bill she can’t afford right now and she sits Fievel down on the couch.
She wants to write off the fact that her son literally vanished before her eyes to the concussion. But - she thinks about a locked preschool classroom and a son that has a tendency to vanish when she takes her eyes off of him and -
It makes too much sense.
“Baby.” She asks, “Can you teleport?”
“What’s tell-ee-port?” Fievel asks, scrunching up his nose.
“Do you find yourself in other places without getting up and going to them?”
“Yeah.” Fievel states it so easily, like she’s dumb. “I told you so.”
She pressed her fingers to her face, “Can you do it now?”
Fievel frowns and then scrunches up his face real hard and then -
He’s gone. And then he’s opening his bedroom door and scurrying back out. He runs over and tugs at her pants eagerly, “I did it! Did I do good?”
She crouches down and ruffles his hair even though it kills her ribs, because she can’t pick him up with a broken arm. “Yeah baby,” She praises him, mind moving at an hour a minute, “You did good.”
That night she lays in her bed and watches Fievel’s chest rise and fall as he sleeps. He sprawls out like a starfish but sometimes in the night always buries himself into her side like a tick. She’s put a pillow in between them to try and spare her poor ribs, but she has doubts it will work.
Her son can fucking teleport.
That’s when she cries. Because she loves her son, but he’s a handful. She didn’t even notice. She didn’t notice that he son has a superpower. Doesn’t that make her the worst mother in the world?
Crying is a terrible idea. Her ribs are painful enough that she can’t sleep. She needs to ration her pain medication because they really can’t afford it.
How is she supposed to handle this? How is she supposed to raise a child that can vanish without a second thought? Her bright beautiful boy who loves feeding the ducks and being pushed on the swings and playing unfathomable games with his friend Emma that she can’t even begin to understand the plot of.
(She’s almost certain one of them is supposed to be a cheetah for some reason? Or a lion? There’s a lot of running involved in the game, and hiding.)
It’s a few months later when her arm is healed and her ribs are better and Fievel is turning five when everything comes crashing down. Because she doesn’t get a call from the school. She gets a call from the police.
Apparently Fievel managed to get out of the school far enough away that he got lost. He admits tearfully to her that he’s been getting further and further away when he ‘jumps’ - and it’s not his fault. He tries not to jump. But it happens whether he wants it to or not and if he keeps getting further and further away then -
She thinks of a car and a road and putting her body between death and her son. And she thinks about the fact that when he jumps, she isn’t there.
Look. She’s not stupid. She always knew that her kid wasn’t exactly a normal child.
(Hello. He’s practically a miracle. She wasn’t exactly a virgin but that doesn’t really matter when she was very suddenly nine months pregnant where she hadn’t been before.)
So she reckons that the powers have something to do with that. And who does she know that definitely has a child who was also one of the miracle babies?
(He’d mentioned he’d already acquired like, what, four kids when he came to see her. As though that was supposed to make her want to give up her kid even more.)
So she requests some vacation days (that she can’t afford) and she pulls Fievel out of preschool for a week (it’s preschool it’s not that important) and they fly over to a city where she can hopefully get some answers.
(Fievel spends the whole flight with his face pressed to the window and his plane toy clutched tightly in one hand and his stuffed dog in the other as he enthusiastically makes whooshing noises.)
And she goes up the the big mansion thing and knocks and goes inside where she smiles at Fievel and tells him to go play with the other children while she talks to Mr. Hargreeves, thank you baby.
As she clenches her hands into fists and listens to Sir Reginald Hargreeves condescend to her about her ability as a mother, Fievel enthusiastically bounces over to the kids his age who stare at him like they’ve never seen anything like him before in their life.
(“I’m Fievel!” He introduces himself loudly, “And this is Doggy! My mama is here to speak to your dad.”
“Uh. I’m Six.” A bewildered little girl says back.
Fievel blinks, “Oh! I just turned five.”
The girl giggles, “No! No I mean my name’s Six. but I’m five-years-old as well.”
“That’s a funny name.” Fievel says.
“Nuh uh.” The girl refutes, “Your name is weird. See, ‘cause we’re all numbers ‘n you’re not.”
And he’s introduced to them all. One is tall and awkward looks. Two hides behind the others a little bit. Three has her hands on her hips and she looks at him, but softens when he tells her that he likes her hair. Four is a skinny wisp of a kid, with big wide eyes and no sense of personal space. Five sticks pretty close to Four. And Six, of course, is the one who talked to him first which obviously means that they’re temporary best friends.
Temporary, because of course Emma is his best friend. ‘Cause she’s in his class and they sit near each other and play together with each other first.)
And his mother comes out to Fievel bossing the others around and them going with it, all with bewildered little expressions on their faces. Fievel is balancing on the back of the sofa next to a little girl who is holding Doggy, possibly in the middle of an evil villain speech? The little girl is solemnly petting Doggy like she’s a Bond villain at the very least.
It makes her smile, just a little bit.
“Fievel, baby, can you come here for a second?” She asks, and her son beams at him and vanishes from his seat over to by her leg where he pulls on her leg so that she’ll sweep him up into her arms.
(The children gape at him, all wide eyes and staring between them and their father like they’re shocked. And they probably are. Reginald has informed her that none of them can teleport, but they do have a variety of weird powers between them.)
“You know that you’re getting big.” She says, and she tries not to cry, “And you’re not going to be in preschool soon enough.”
“Yeah!” He enthuses, “Gonna learn real stuff!”
And that’s just like her son. Voraciously hungry for knowledge.
“Well, this is a school for very special people.” She tells him, and watches his eyes go big and round, “People who... can teleport, for example.”
Fievel considers that. And then twists around to look at the other children, “You can teleport?” He demands loudly, like it’s a betrayal of the highest form that they’ve been friends for an hour and this hasn’t been brought up. And maybe it is. She doesn’t claim to understand the intricacies of children’s hierarchy.
“Uh uh!” A little boy exclaims, frowning. “I can just throw stuff real good.”
“I’m strong.” Another little boy offers. And then proceeds to demonstrate this by picking up half the couch and sending the little girl careening onto the floor with a shout, but she gets up and dusts herself off easily enough.
“Okay.” Fievel says brightly, appeased by this somehow as he twists back to his mother expectantly.
“Okay.” She says, her mouth dry. “Well. This is a special school for special kids. It’s, uh. It’s a boarding school.”
“What’s that?”
“It means you stay here.” She tells him. “I’ll - I’ll come and see you when I can. And you can call me whenever you want. But you have to stay here.”
“Like a sleepover?” Fievel asks, scrunching his face up in confusion.
“A little bit.” Her smile feels weak and forced and she can’t even see it. “Like a lot of sleepovers all in a row. And when you wake up, you don’t need to go anywhere because you live at the school.”
“Uh uh. I live at home.”
“Baby...” She cards her fingers through his hair. “I know it’s scary. I don’t want you to go either - ”
“Then I don’t gotta.” Fievel says, matter of fact as he starts wiggling to get down. She hefts him up in her arms.
“Baby. Fievel. Listen to me.” She says firmly, “I can’t take care of you well enough.”
He looks at her with betrayed eyes.
“It’s not your fault. You can’t control your powers.” She tells him softly, because she loves him and she doesn’t want to give him up but - “I can’t keep you safe, baby. And the teachers can’t keep you safe. But you’ll be safe here.”
“I don’t want to.” Fievel says, loudly. In the tone which says that a tantrum is approaching.
“You’ll learn how to control your powers!” She says in a forced cheery voice.
“I’m going to school with Emma.” Fievel insists in a slightly louder voice.
“You’re already getting along great with the other kids.” She insists.
“NO.” Fievel says, at maximum volume, and then he’s gone from her arms and she’s stumbling because it’s weird to go from holding something to nothing.
“He’ll show up in a bit.” She assures Sir Hargreeves, beyond tired. He’s been watching the whole interaction and she hopes he hasn’t gotten a negative impression of her son.
If he’s able to handle six other super powered children then surely he can handle hers. No matter what he asks. No matter how difficult it was to sign over the rights to her child. He promised that she can visit Fievel on weekends whenever she wants, for however long her son wants to do so.
He’s going to keep her child safe. He won’t be running out onto streets. He’ll be able to train his powers, be able to control them, and maybe one day -
(Maybe one day she’ll get her baby back. Safe and sound in her arms and able to control his powers so she doesn’t have to worry at all.)
So she leaves, and she leaves Fievel alone. And no matter how much he screams and cries and begs, no one lets him go back to his mother. He tries to run off, tries to jump away and follow after her - but a blond woman in pristine skirts comes and retrieves him.
(He tries to jump away, but she keeps coming and finding him until he’s too tired to protest when she carries him back to his new (prison) school in her arms.)
Reginald tries to lock him in his room. He jumps out. Reginald tries to put him in time out. He jumps out. Reginald says he doesn’t get any dinner. Fievel jumps downstairs and raids the cupboards in the night.
It becomes an intense battle of wills between Sir Reginald Hargreeves and little Fievel.
Locks go on the cabinets, Fievel breaks them off by bashing them with one of the bookends he manages to snag. Reginald refuses to let Fievel play with the others. Fievel runs away again and has to be brought back by the blond lady.
(“You can call me Grace if you’re so against mom.” she had told him demurely, after he yelled himself hoarse telling her that she’s not his mother that he has a mother and that she’s so much better in every way)
Then Reginald takes Doggy away, and Fievel begrudgingly has to fall in line lest he risk his stuffed companion. One of the only links to his real life he has.
(He doesn’t even get to keep his clothes. He has to wear the stiff awful uniform that the other kids wear. It’s the absolute worst. He looks stupid but no one listens to him.)
When his mother comes to visit, Fievel is sullen and still angry with her for abandoning him. He sulks and doesn’t talk to her a lot.
He grows like this. The Umbrella Academy turns six, and then others receive names after Fievel loudly points out that having numbers for names is weird and that no one should ever trust a man who names his kids numbers it’s lazy and stupid.
So One becomes Luther and Two becomes Diego and Three becomes Allison and Four becomes Klaus and Five becomes Ben and Six becomes Vanya.
And Fievel becomes Five.
They all think it’s really funny, that they all get names instead of numbers and Five gets a number instead of a name.
He’s six and Reginald sits him down and tells him in no uncertain terns that his mother essentially sold him. That Reginald controls him. And if Five isn’t a good boy then... well. Bad boys don’t get to visit their mothers.
(Reginald finds a far more... effective way of controlling Five than a stuffed animal.)
(Good boys also don’t talk to their mothers about their training. They smile and act happy and lie because they want to keep seeing her. They don’t tell her about how scary it is, how they desperately want to come home, how maybe their mother could take all the kids because they don’t even have mothers and it isn’t fair.)
So Five grows bigger, gets new uniform, clashes with Reginald as much as he dares, and settles in to life at the academy. He sprawls across Vanya’s floor and tries to remember all the story books he read with his mother.
(There’s only grown up books in the manor that they’re expected to read. And Five likes them, he loves to learn, but - he misses storytime. He misses the wonderful books about adventure and other worlds. He misses when he felt like he was going to go on an adventure because he had powers and was special!
He doesn’t wish he’s special anymore.)
Vanya asks him once why he hangs out with her, because she’s normal. Because she doesn’t have powers.
And Five looks at her and tells her that that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. He spend years surrounded by people without powers. He tells her about his best friend Emma, who definitely didn’t have powers.
“I wish I had a best friend.” Vanya tells him, face sad and drawn and Five pulls her into the fiercest hug he can.
“You’re not my best friend,” He tells her, and she looks even sadder until he finishes it up with, “You’re my sister.”
“But you have a mother.” She says, sounding confused.
Five shrugs, “Doesn’t matter. Reginald is legally my dad, and he’s legally your dad, and so we share a dad. That makes us siblings.”
“Is a sibling better than a best friend?” Vanya asks after a long moment of silence.
Five doesn’t think so. He misses Emma. He misses his preschool. He misses his life, the life before the Academy. But Vanya looks so sad and pale that he hugs her again and says “Yeah, of course. We’re family.”
The others tolerate him in varied amounts. Luther thinks he’s dumb because he’s always mean to Reginald. Five thinks Luther is dumb, and he’s definitely right. Allison constantly bugs him for information about what she terms “the outside world” and Five has told her about birthday parties at least a dozen times and she still looks wistful and asks him to tell her about them again.
(They turn eight and Five produces a paper crown for his sister because she looked so wistful when he described Emma’s birthday tiara. Allison wears it until Reginald snaps at her to get rid of it, but Five sees her tuck it in the waistband of her skirt rather than throw it away.)
When Reginald snaps at Diego for his stutter, Five snarls and snaps back, getting between the man and his new brother and yelling because he knows that’s not how you help kids! Yelling doesn’t help! His teacher said so! And his mama!
Diego is never particularly thankful for his interference, but Five doesn’t care.
Five is nine and he jumps into the mausoleum with Klaus and holds his most fragile brother and snarls, threatens to run away. To take Klaus and just go, that they’d go to Five’s mother and she would take them away from Reginald and this place and -
Klaus always buries himself into Five’s side with his hands over his ears until the morning when Five either jumps away or glares with furious eyes at Reginald even when he’s punished after.
He’s nine when he gets into a screaming match with Diego who says that Five isn’t one of them that he has his mother and if he had the chance he would abandon them in a heartbeat.
Reginald threatens to cut off his mother’s visits if he finds Five interfering with “Number Four’s training” one more time.
Five looks at Klaus, who is his brother. Who is frail and skinny and pale with dark bags underneath his eyes.
Reginald looks satisfied because Five has always backed down before when his mother is threatened. It’s his ultimate trump card.
Five is so very very tired of his mother being used against him. And he loves Klaus. And these kids, they are his siblings. (He tries not to think about the fact that next year he’ll have officially been here just as long as he was with his mother. He hates it.)
Reginald finds Five in the mausoleum with cobwebs in his hair and his brother against his side and a glare on his face and Reginald forbids his next visit with his mother.
Five keeps jumping into the mausoleum. Klaus looks at him with wonder in his eyes and Five pries up the floorboard that hides Doggy (because even after Reginald found a better way to threaten him, he remembers) and cries himself to sleep.
“You chose us.” Ben states instead of asks, very quietly, when they’re studying together.
“My mother can look after herself.” Five says stiffly, not taking his eyes off the page. “Klaus can’t.”
Ben doesn’t say anything more, but Five feels eyes on his back for a good long while after that.
When Five is ten, they debut for the first time. They go to the bank, and stop the robbers.
(“We can’t send Ben in,” Five insists, “They’ll die!”
“They’re robbers.” Luther scoffs, crossing his arms.
“Doesn’t matter. They’re still people.” Five insists. “You definitely aren’t supposed to kill people. It’s a law.”
“Shut up, Five.” Diego says grouchily, “We just need to get this over with.”
“Dad’ll be pissed off if we let any of them escape.” Allison says, and the whole group goes quiet as they consider their father’s disappointed fury.
“I’ll go.” Ben mutters reluctantly, and Five tries to meet his eyes but the other boy slips into the vault before he can. The group stands silently as they listen to the screams and watch the blood splatter.
“This is wrong.” Five whispers.
“This is how it is.” Klaus whispers back, sounding defeated.
They don’t talk about it, after.)
Five smiles for the camera and lets Klaus lean on his shoulder and steals a thing of tissues from a reporter’s purse and uses them to wipe more of the blood from Ben’s face with a tight smile and the world goes on.
(He doesn’t know his mother watched. Doesn’t know the fury she flew into. Her son was supposed to be safe - he was supposed to be at a school. Why the fuck was he stopping a bank robbery like some kind of little child soldier?
She becomes a problem. And Reginald can be awfully practical about problems.)
Five is ten-and-a-half and he hasn’t seen his mother in a year and a half. And he’s tired and he’s rebellious so one day he sneaks out and finds a pay phone and the only reason he remembers his number is because his mother made him memorize it and quizzed him frequently.
(He’d gotten lost so often from wandering away and accidentally jumping. His rules were to approach either women with children or people who worked wherever and ask them to call her.)
Except the call can’t connect. Disconnected number.
Five frowns, and end up doing some research which involves massive lies to the library, and then he has a picture of a newspaper obituary in his hands and a hole in his heart.
Car accident, the paper says.
Five crumbles it up, and then smoothes it out again because there’s a picture of his mother next to the article and Five doesn’t have any pictures of his mother. So he hides it under the floorboards next to Doggy and cries himself to sleep and then he gets up and does his training and doesn’t talk about it.
He doesn’t tell his siblings. Not even when Luther blows up and calls him a stuck up brat who can go cry to his mommy if he think it’s so bad here. Not even when Klaus jokes about running away with a cracking voice in the mausoleum, not really jokes at all. Not even when Vanya asked him for another of his mother’s stories and he started crying in the middle of them. He’d just told her it had been a hard day of training.
(Vanya never asks him questions if he mentions training. He feels bad about lying to her and using it as an excuse but...)
He waits for Reginald to tell him. He waits, because surely someone would tell him that his mother is dead. He’s her son.
Reginald never tells him. He tells Five that he’s bad and still hasn’t earned back his visiting privileges. Five hates him so much. So so much.
Five is twelve-years-old and he is sprawled across Vanya’s bed after a particularly brutal day of training. Reginald has been trying to overtrain Five the day before he puts Klaus in the mausoleum overnight so that Five will be too tired to jump in. It doesn’t work, but it’s an exhausting enough punishment.
“I wish I didn’t have powers.” He tells Vanya.
“No you don’t.” Vanya says back fiercely, fists clenching in her blankets, “Not having powers sucks.”
Five tilts his head and looks at her, “No.” He says gently, “No one knew I had powers. And I was loved. I was so loved, Vanya.”
“Stop it.” Vanya says, face tight. “If you were so loved, why did she leave you here?”
And Five opens his mouth and nothing comes out, because it hurts.
“You don’t wish you had powers, Vanya.” Five tells her finally, and there are tears in his eyes but he’s looking at the ceiling not at her so it doesn’t matter. “You wish you had a family. A proper family. Not this - this stupid academy. I hate it. I hate it here.”
“Don’t call it stupid.” Vanya says, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair that you have a family and we just - we just have the academy, okay? So don’t call it stupid.”
“We deserve better. We deserve a childhood.”
“We have a childhood.” Vanya scowls, “Just because it’s not as nice as yours was or whatever - ”
“This is my childhood, Vanya.” Five snarls, propping himself up to face her, “I know you all think I’m so spoiled and - and I’m not one of you or whatever, but I came here when I was five. My memories of before - Vanya they’re fading. I couldn’t pick Emma out of a crowd if I tried. I’ve been here for years longer than I was ever there, and it’s not fair.”
“You still have a mother - ”
“No I don’t.” Five cuts her off, his voice ice. Vanya’s eyes are wide, startled by his tone. “Vanya, look around you. When was the last time I saw my mother?”
Vanya’s lip wobbles as she realized she can’t remember.
“It’s been three years.” Five tells her, eyes hard and cold and angry, “She’s gone. I made a choice, and I chose you. I chose the academy. Because despite everything, I love you guys. You’re my siblings, even if sometimes you don’t act like it.”
“Five - ” Vanya tries.
“No.” Five cuts her off, hopping off the bed and shaking his head, “I’m going to - I’m going to go to my room. You get some more practice in or something. I think Pogo picked out this piece and you know what he’s like.”
He doesn’t let her get a word in before he jumps up to his room.
Five is twelve when he stands in front of Reginald and says “I’m not using my powers anymore.”
“You have an assignment.” Reginald says severely.
“No.” Five refuses politely, and his family watches with wide eyes from the sidelines. The only family he has left. “I’ve got control now. I’ve decided I’m going to be normal now.”
Reginald locks Klaus is the mausoleum early and watches with unimpressed eyes as Five picks the lock and strolls in.
Reginald handcuffs Five to a rail. Five plucks a paperclip from his sock and picks those as well.
Reginald locks Five in a room from the outside and tells him that he’ll get dinner when he jumps out.
Five opens the window and shimmies down the drainpipe and has to be picked up at Griddy’s where he’s charmed the owner out of a free doughnut and hot chocolate with a sob story about school bullies to explain his grubby appearance (the shimmy down the drainpipe hadn’t exactly been graceful. or clean.)
He locks Five in the basement in a weird room that’s soundproofed. Five tries to hunger strike but - it’s so quiet. He can hear the sound of his own heartbeat. He can’t stand it. It’s like the room was made specifically to torture him.
(He looks at the little bed in the room. The sheets were dusty. This room has been around for a very long time. He wonders who it’s for, Allison, perhaps? She’s always been fairly obedient, maybe this is the reason why.)
He jumps out on the second day, and doesn’t talk to anybody. Reginald is smug like the cat the got the canary, and Five hates it.
Then Five is messing around, and something slots into place, and he realizes - oh, he might be able to time travel.
Once he figures it out, he’s desperate. He’ll save his siblings that way. He’ll take the to a time where Reginald can’t get them. They’ll be out of reach.
(maybe - maybe they can travel back in time. maybe he can save his mother -)
Five is thirteen-years-old when he time travels for the first time. When he runs out of the house like he’s done so very many times before, except he’s angry and frustrated and he’d tried to bait Reginald into telling him his mother’s dead again and he hadn’t and -
Five jumps. It’s snowing. He did it. He jumps again, laughing. He jumps again -
Ash.
He tries to jump, but his power fizzles out. He calls for his siblings. No one answers. He finds the academy - rubble.
So Five lives in the apocalypse. He tries to go home, he does. He buries his siblings as well as he can. He wanders around gathering food and textbooks. He picks up a mannequin and names it Dolores.
(He searches the rubble of the academy, but he can’t find Doggy or the picture of his mother. Either they were found and removed years ago, or they’re buried beneath too much rubble. Five doesn’t know.)
He takes Dolores on a road trip. He tells her it’s to see if they can find any people, any survivors.
he arrives in a graveyard and traces his mother’s name with trembling fingers. this is the first time he’s been to visit her grave. this is the first time he’s seen her in four years.
So he survives. He grows up, desperately clinging to life by his fingernails. He does complex calculations, wondering what his mother would think of him now.
He meets the Handler. He becomes an assassin.
(he’s glad his mother is dead, so that she will never see what he has become.)
And then one day, he gets home. He falls into the courtyard, and looks at the faces of his grown up siblings and -
(he’s so tired of losing people. he’s so tired of being taken away from his family.)
He hops to Griddy’s, he gets into a fight with assassins, he cuts a tracker from his arm, and he goes to Vanya’s apartment.
And he’s Five, but he’s also Fievel. And somewhere inside he’s still that same kid who loved his mother and wanted her to fix thing, who trusted her even though she didn’t have powers. His mother wasn’t ordinary, and he’s never seen Vanya as such.
So he asks her for her help.
(Later, she tells him that they hunted down his mother when they were fifteen, because they’d been absolutely convinced he’d just run away and gone back to herno matter how much Reginald insisted he was dead.
That’s when they found out about her death. Her date of death.
“I’m so sorry, Five.” Vanya says, tears in her eyes as the whole family shuffles and looks away.
And Five puts his hand on Vanya’s. “I knew, Van.”
Her head snaps up. Klaus blurts out a what in the background.
Five shrugs, “I’ve known since we were ten. It’s okay.”)
Five sends Vanya to investigate the eye.
(He asks Klaus - “Have you - ”
“No.” Klaus says instantly, shaking his head. He knows what Five is asking.
Five considers that answer, then shrugs. He’s not sure if it would be better or worse for his mother to be one of the ghosts that tormented Klaus. “After I - after, did dad get worse?”
“Yeah.” Klaus says simply, because it’s true.
Five hadn’t been there to jump into the mausoleum and try and shield his brother from invisible enemies.
“I’m sorry.” Five says quietly.
“Me too.”)
Vanya comes back and the eye hasn’t been made yet. Five swears, loudly and at length.
And maybe in another world Five snaps at Klaus and denies Vanya and goes off on his own and ignores Allison but -
In this one, Five was the only kid who not only didn’t care that Vanya was ‘ordinary’ but actively challenged her on it. Who told her in no uncertain terms that he was jealous of her.
(It’s a very different book that comes out.)
In this world, Five shielded Klaus and challenged Reginald. He jumped into the mausoleum and hugged his brother and, most importantly, he chose Klaus over his mother. And Klaus knows that. Klaus has... a lot of loyalty to Five, and even though he’d though for a long time that Five abandoned him... he knows better now and he feels - he feels guilty for doubting his brother. That guilt may or may not manifest in being a bit clingy.
In this world, Allison thought Five was fascinating because he’d been in the real world. He’d been to real school. She remembers him telling her about his mother, about trips to the zoo and the museums and the birthday parties, about sleepovers and playdates and parks.
(She has a daughter, and she takes Claire to the children’s museums and to zoos. She tries her best for her daughter and hears Five’s voice telling stories in her ears. She does her best to be a good mother, she tries so hard.)
It’s a slightly more united family that stands against the apocalypse.
But there’s always something with them, isn’t there?
“Don’t you know?” The Handler says, with her perfect lipstick smile, “I don’t have to win, I just have to take you out of the game. Your weak spot has always been the same, hasn’t it?”
“You don’t have shit.” Five says, unimpressed. “My family is fine.”
“Are you so sure about that, Fievel?”
(Five already chose his siblings over his mother the first time. The choice is... much more difficult the second time.)
#delayed au#tua au#far tua long#long post#five has a mother !!#the umbrella academy#five hargreeves#number five#it's been a while since we had a new au from me huh squad#who guessed that the handler had the mother#be honest#just saying the commission has the power to produce a body double#and klaus *never saw her*#what should i even name the mother#i'm thinking amira but idk#five is baby and he misses his mother a whole lot#can you IMAGINE the reunion#but yeah reggie paid to have five's mum killed bc she was FURIOUS#and decided to try fight for five back#she said 'no son of mine is being a child vigilante fuck that' and tried to sue for him back or like#jail reggie for child endangerment or something#i spent like way too much time on baby five honestly#Anonymous
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For The Sake Of Better Times (Ler Hawks/Lee Dabi)
This has been a long time coming bruh. Hope you like it Eevee my heart and soul was poured into this. Love you and everything that you do <3
When you see big bad villains on TV or on the big screen, you usually see them in the midst of an incredible battle. Guns blaring, fiery explosions, big declarations of their victory over the hero. All of these big productions of turning the world into something that fits their own worldview, even if that worldview is broken and demented. One often wonders what's going on behind the mind of someone who has that worldview; one who sees a perfectly fine place as disgusting and corrupt. Because they've been through the disgusting and corrupt, and they know that not everyone's glass walls have been shattered as theirs has. The big explosions and wide killing sprees and wild maniacal laughter of a textbook villain is nothing compared to the wild currents blurring their mind and storming their heart.
The League of Villains, a villain organization made up of powerful quirk abusers and double agents had no current agenda as of today. Most of the patrons that made up the alliance were residing in their hideout, a hollowed-out building that was restored to resemble a bar service. One of the villains that participated in the League, Dabi, occupied a bar stool and watched the latest news intently from the flat screen in the corner of the room.
A new interrogation method against villains was being proposed by the Hero Commission, the spokesperson reported, an interrogation method that would take a sensitivity-heightening quirk and develop it into a mass-produced serum. This serum, once administered, would take the subjects five senses and heighten them to make nearly any stimuli incredibly uncomfortable. Using this, tools and extra manpower would be unnecessary seeing as how the subject would be sensitive to almost anything that would be thrown at them.
Dabi rolled his lidded eyes at this. What a pathetic way of saying that the Hero Commission couldn't handle the enemies as they came, they had to power them down as well as they could to get the upper hand. Taking advantage of the villain's five senses just for interrogation purposes seemed inhumane. Another patron to the League of Villains, Himiko Toga, didn't have the same reaction to this news, however.
"Ehehehee!~ Doesn't that sound so thrilling, Dabi-Kun? Being unable to resist anything the interrogators decide to do to your unwilling body, whether you liked it or not? What if the interrogator is cute, all of your forced reactions will be the product of their actions against you! Ooooh, my heart is pounding!~" Toga smiled dreamily and twirled around like a princess, although Dabi didn't know any princesses who wielded knives with dried blood crusted over the blade. Toga threw herself onto Dabi's shoulders and pinched the spikes that his onyx hair naturally made when it was tousled like this.
"Say you agree with me, Dabi-Kun~ We can be freaks together!" Toga's voice dropped to a seductive mutter in Dabi's ear, but this had no effect on him. The villain wasn't attracted to girls like Toga, or girls of any nature, now that he was finding out. He was about to reply, surprisingly, before he felt a finger slide down his side. He felt the pressure end at the top of his hip, but to this, he only gazed at Toga's hand to make sure the blonde villain didn't pull anything. Toga visibly pouted when the male villain didn't give her the reaction she wanted.
"Dabi-Kun! You're not ticklish? Why nooot? No tickles for big bad Blueflame?" Toga's fingers started to wriggle over Dabi's left side, but he simply watched. Watching the fingers slide over his cotton shirt made a memory flashbang in his mind, but the vision soon slid away once he thought about it. The bored villain slapped away his partner's hand and signaled the barkeep, Kurogiri, for a drink.
"I don't have time for kid games like those." He said simply. This caught the attention of a certain personality in the room, a personality that not everyone was excited to see, but his presence was necessary nevertheless. The number two hero on the Pro Hero Charts, Keigo Takami, or Hawks, peered up above the couch he was seated on to get a glimpse of the onyx villain. The double agent's amber eyes shone in the dim lighting as something that the villain said piqued his interest.
"Oh boo. You and Shiggy-Kun aren't ticklish like I want you to be. This place would be so much cuter if you were! Maybe I can steal a few of those serums from the Hero Commission and turn you into my little-" Toga daydreamed out loud, but a swooshing sound interrupted behind her, like a pile of feathers were thrown onto a chair. In a sense, they were. The double agent Hawks had selected a barstool to sit in next to Dabi, which Dabi groaned at. Hawks gave Toga a warm smile despite their different lines of profession.
"Himiko, Shig-Man needs to see ya in his office. Said it was urgent, and you know he hates to wait. Maybe he overheard your serum idea and wants to play a prank on Twice." At this, Toga swooned and gave a girlish squeal of excitement.
"Oh, how exciting! I already know the table I want to strap him into!~" The blonde villain skipped out of the room, humming a sweet song despite her knife scraping up the plaster on the walls as she ran past. Hawks watched her leave and shook his head, turning back to see Kurogiri handing Dabi his drink.
"So, Staples, when you say that you don't have time for certain kid games, what exactly are those kid games? Are you saying that you played different games when you were a kid?" Dabi threw the conniving man a sideways glance as he finished the sip of his darkly colored drink.
"Staples? The hell kinda name is that? It's Dabi, and nothing more. Secondly, you don't get to know the kid games I played when I was younger. Because I didn't play any of them." Dabi's tone was quiet but forceful. Sometimes that was scarier than being loud and upfront. Hawks, or Keigo, drummed his fingers over the wooden barkeep. Dabi's response didn't scare him, not this time anyway; it riled him up. His crimson wings were puffed up and clearly agitated like an upset bird.
"So what did you do over the course of your childhood then? You didn't pop up in the gutter at 24 years old and just start blowing shit up." Keigo was needling for something; he didn't know what it was exactly, he just wanted to get any indication that Dabi had been happy at least once in his life. Maybe happy with a childhood friend-
"Let it alone before I turn you into a burnt chicken wing," Dabi growled and shoved his barstool back to stalk out of the room. Kurogiri watched silently. Keigo's left leg bounced as he thought up an idea to look inside Dabi's past. There was something that the blonde hero was looking for, and maybe with enough pressure, Dabi would give it up. Keigo sniffed and looked up to the television, the Pro Hero Eraserhead speaking on the panel about the developments of the sensitivity-heightening serum.
"-serum is now being trial-tested against our own strongest participants. This project will put an end to cruel and unusual interrogation methods. The Hero Commission recognizes that these villains are wicked, yes, but they still deserve to be treated with a level of dignity and respect that these new developing methods will offer. Thank you very much for your time." The tired hero stood from his chair and bowed towards the reporters who were all asking their questions at once. Keigo's wings suddenly perked up with an incredible idea.
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
"Yeah, Shig said he wanted us in the conference room. Something about this sensitivity-heightening serum has him rubbed the wrong way." Keigo relayed onto Dabi, who was walking right next to the conniving hero. The hero's heart was racing. Two days after the incident at the bar, the number two hero had pulled some strings with the scientists creating the serum and had them form it into a gas. He had them make it under confidential means. It was the chloroform gas that was the hard part to set up-
"Whatever it is, let's get done with it. I got shit to do." So short and to the point with him. Keigo was jealous of Dabi's straightforward demeanor. Alright, the room was almost here. Just a little bit further before Dabi realized that they were needed in the conference room that was on the other side of the building.
The golden double agent and the onyx villain walked into a decontamination hallway, the doors on either side locking and bolting shut. Dabi looked visibly confused before it was replaced with his usual bored expression. The villain turned to the hero for an explanation. Keigo shrugged nonchalantly.
"You know the boss. Every precaution is not nearly enough..." Dabi had turned his back on the hero as he narrowed his eyes towards the chambers that held the decontaminating spray. There were black nozzles screwed onto the chambers that hadn't been there before. Dabi's cyan eyes flew open as a thin vapor began to seep into the chamber. Keigo had just clamped a mask over his own mouth and nose as Dabi was already losing consciousness, his knees striking the floor and his hands sending out small defensive flames. Keigo relished a quick moment of pride as he watched the hardened villain choke on the powerful gas, his head already rolling to the side in defeat.
The hero knelt down beside Dabi and held his cheek; the insane murderer looking almost innocent in his peaceful rest. "Poor Dabi. You'll realize soon enough that I'm doing you a favor. You and I both need to find out what happened to Touya Todoroki.."
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
The room was cold, freezing even, as if the cold air were needles sticking into his skin. He was too aware of his surroundings even with his eyes closed; the biting leather strapped over his arms and legs, his soft cotton shirt now a lead weight on his chest, his soft aerodynamic hair now a dense mat on his forehead. It was incredibly bizarre and uncomfortable; it was like he was feeling everything all at once. And not just feeling; The dim lights in the room were bright enough to him that they stabbed into his shut eyes, he could taste the acrid gas that had knocked him out on his tongue despite it being hours since that had happened, the low buzzing of the generator outside of this holding cell was a high enough frequency to give him a headache. The skin stitched between his scarred skin and pale skin were like live wires sparking against his nerves.
"Sensory overload, must be absolute hell. I can't imagine what it must feel like. Then again I'm not really interested in finding out. Oh, and don't try to get yourself out with your flames. Not only will it hurt like hell against your sensitive skin, but your quirk has been canceled out anyway. I totally didn't have some guests over while you were konked to help me set this up...and take pictures of you." The voice that was speaking to Dabi sounded like he was fighting back a laugh. It was also damn loud and obnoxious, more so than with this sensitivity-heightening serum coursing through his veins.
Dabi's lidded eyes opened with a furiousness in his pupils so honest that Keigo swallowed nervously. Dabi had his arms strapped outward on either side of him, his palms face up and clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white. Leather straps were pulled tight over his biceps, forearms, and wrists. A belt laid dangling by the side of the table in case his midsection needed restraint, and his legs were held down at his thighs, above his knees and his ankles. Keigo couldn't help but look him over a few times; the villain looked like he was made just to be on this table and in these restraints.
"Let. Me. Out. Before I set your skeleton on fire." Dabi growled, and pulled on the restraints. They were tight and unforgiving, no wiggling room here. Whatever was in that serum also made sure to sap him of his strength; the once strong villain felt as if he were made of liquid. Keigo shook his head and tsked, walking over to place a hand on Dabi's belly. The hero's light hand felt like a five-pound weight on the sensitive villain. Dabi watched the hero's every move, although it didn't feel like nearly enough to prepare him for what was to come.
"Tsk tsk, little blueflame. You really think I'd set you free after everything I've done to get you here? Not to mention," Keigo's luminous golden eyes looked up to Dabi's cyan ones, a hardened seriousness in the pupils, "that you're a convicted child abductor." Keigo removed his hand from Dabi's chest, and Dabi took in a deep breath once Keigo had looked away. The villain felt as if a weight had been removed from his chest. This serum was horribly effective; it almost made him sick.
Keigo turned back to Dabi and cracked his knuckles. Dabi started to sweat; he had no idea just how elevated his nerve endings were and how they would receive everything, but he felt like all of his nerves were standing on the edge of his skin, just underneath the surface. Despite his anxiety, Dabi cleared his throat and shook his head.
"I'm no child abductor. That brat from UA was Shigaraki's project. I knew the kid was bad news from the start." His voice came out evenly, thank God. But this didn't convince Hawks. Keigo walked back over to Dabi and inspected his restraints. The fun must be about to start, Dabi involuntarily thought in his head. He took choppy breathes, wondering what torture would be first on the docket.
"Nah ah ah, not Bakugou. I'm talking about Touya Todoroki. He's been missing for about 10 years now. He came from a loving family with siblings and friends alike...but he suddenly disappeared. And you were the last one to have been seen around him." Dabi's heart flipped at the name. He didn't know why, he's never heard the name before. But something settled in his stomach like a fluttering of butterfly wings. Keigo placed his hands flat on the table on either side of Dabi, the warmth of his skin was even felt against Dabi's hypersensitive nerves.
"You're gonna tell me what you did to Touya Todoroki, even if I have to force you." Dabi looked at Keigo like he was a crazy person. He's never taken a kid named Touya, but his body felt like it remembered the name even if his brain didn't. Dabi cleared his throat and hardened himself before looking back up at Keigo.
"Whatever you do won't get the truth. You have the wrong guy, and even if I did have any idea what you're talking about, I wouldn't give you shit." Keigo chuckled darkly at this and set his bare fingers up to Dabi's triceps and traced along the muscled lines in his skin. Keigo hardened his own expression, flat gold disks looking into even blue plains, and smirked at Dabi's immediate reaction. The villain had twitched and jolted in his chair, his fists balling up and his muscles flexing underneath the leather straps.
"We'll see about that. Oh-ho-ho, we'll see." The blonde hero kept his smirk on his face as Dabi tried to worm away from the alien sensations; Keigo lightly tracing his fingers underneath the villain's twitching arms. Dabi hasn't felt a sensation this light in years; he's completely forgotten anything could feel so gentle and tingly.
"Ya know Stitches, this sensitivity-heightening quirk caught my eye for a reason. The scientists who developed it reported that nerves the subject thought had gone dormant years ago were suddenly reawakened, like the kindles of a dying fire bursting into bright flames in a split second." Dabi's fingers knuckled, his breath hitching as Keigo's fingers skittered nearest to his open armpits, but scuttled back at the last second. Dabi shuddered and let out his breath silently. Keigo however, soaked in every delicious reaction with a sadistic hunger.
"At first I thought, "There's no way hardened lowlife criminals could be so sensitive to such small stimulus. Bright lights, loud music, gross smells-" Keigo took both of his pointer fingers and circled them around the outer rim of Dabi's armpits, which made Dabi's eyes fly open and suck in his breath. The damn tingles were climbing in his arms and fluttering in his chest, like there was a swarm of butterflies caged in behind his ribs. "-light touches~ Oh don't tell me these light touches are doing anything for you, are they? They're already drawing out such animated expressions from the most stoic man I've ever seen stalk this earth."
Dabi's stomach was jumping, like he was going uphill on a rollercoaster, just waiting for the descent. The onyx villain's fingers relaxed, however, once Keigo drew his own fingers away from the sensitive spot. Keigo quirked his lips and held his chin, in a thinking pose before the restrained criminal. The blonde hero resembled a butcher standing over a cow carcass, wondering which part of the animal he was gonna slice up first. Dabi swallowed in a dry throat as he chose his words cautiously. As he opened his mouth to speak, Keigo pointed a finger to the ceiling as he thought up what he wanted to say with a delighted grin on his face.
"Of course. There just so happens to be a word for this phenomenon, these light touches that feel like they're taking over your body~" Keigo suddenly swooped in close to Dabi and layered all ten of his fingers onto Dabi's raised individual ribs. Dabi's eyes stared right into the double agent's unreadable expression as the fingers started to press in.
"It's called 'tickling', the kid games that you were dissing earlier. Looks like we have all the time in the world to play them now, right little blueflame? And you're just sensitive enough to enjoy them this time with me~" Keigo's fingers shook into Dabi's ribs, each finger taking up a bone and vibrating into it. Dabi winced instinctively, but instead of pain, he found maddening consistent tingles. Ungracefully, the villain let out a snort and started letting out frantic giggles. His muscled arms pulling on the restraints and his legs hitched up to try and curl into a ball.
"Pffmmt- H-Hahahawks! S-Stohohop thihihis nahahahaow!" Deep baritone laughs rumbled out from Dabi's chest without his consent. There was no restraining or trying to keep back his giggles. Keigo's fingers were like lead weights scribbling on his hypersensitive skin. Keigo had a proud look on his face; he was half-expecting for something like this to simply not work on Dabi. But it seemed the exact opposite was true. This was working a little TOO well; with the hardened criminals face bright and squinted in a look of happiness.
"Mmhmm... If you wanna tell me what happened to Touya Todoroki, I'd be more than happy to help you. On the other hand, though, it looks like you're missing some ribs there, kid. Wouldn't want ya walking around with half an empty ribcage, now would we~" Keigo narrowed his eyes with a smirk on his face as he started from the top of Dabi's ribcage and made sure to scritch each bone and count loudly enough for the villain to hear.
"Ooone...twooo...threee-" "Keihehehego stohohohop!" "Mmmm...I don't think 'stop' is an acceptable number, I'll have to start aaaall the way back at the top~" With Dabi's arms spread on either side of him, every time he bucked to rid himself of the sensation just pushed the hero's lead fingers into his sensitive skin. His skin felt as if Keigo's fingers were actually about to reach inside of him and count the bare bones of his skeleton.
The blonde hero took a moment, stilling his fingers, to watch Dabi's reactions to his stimulus. A bright smile infused with mirth was spread across his face; his eyes already glittering over with tears, and his fluffy hair crowned his head to make him look like a bashful giggling kid. His cheeks were dusted over with a light pink from all his hard chuckles. Keigo bit his tongue to keep back the truth; he wanted to blurt it all out for Dabi so they could hurry up and reminisce together.
The hero covered up his torture stopping by becoming all business and suddenly gripping Dabi's chin to force him to look up into his golden eyes. Dabi was woozy from his lack of oxygen, a dumb smile still plastered across his face. It made Hawks' heart do kickflips, but he couldn't speak to that now.
"Touya Todoroki was declared a missing person 10 years ago on October 25th, 2010. What did you do with him? Is he still alive? When is his birthday?" Keigo threw all of these questions at once at the dumbfounded villain. The villain tried to jerk his head out from the hero's grip but the hero held on tight.
"I told you already you fucking dumbass birdbrain! I never abducted any kid! The squirt probably got hit by a train or was bullied to death by some bastard schoolkids!" That last yelp of desperation left his chest without him realizing what he said. Bullied to death....bullied? Something about that doesn't feel right. Like...it's true. Maybe the kid was bullied. It's almost as if... I've experienced it-
Dabi's thoughts were suddenly scattered with his own bouncing cackles; Hawks' fingers gripping his slender sides and squeezing into them. Hawks made sure to hold onto his bottom ribs and taze them while his thumbs squished into the criminal's skin. Dabi jerked on his leather restraints as the cords of his neck stood out on the surface of his skin from his insane laughter.
"GAHAHAHAD!! STAHAHAHAP!! I DOHOHON'T KNOHOHOW SHIHIHIT!! I SWEHEHEAR!!' The criminal's eyes screwed shut tightly in his laughter, the vibrations so deep and pronounced that it felt like it was inside of him. Dabi's knees pulled up and slammed back down on the table in an attempt to do anything to get out of this situation, but his restraints were too tight. Keigo had a VERY amused look on his face at this recent development.
"Swearing already?~ That's cause for celebration, isn't it? Bravo to our modern scientists for creating something so malicious that it made our hardened criminal swear within the first five minutes~ Although, it doesn't answer my question. Where is Touya Todoroki? What color is his hair? What outfit was he wearing on the day you captured him?" Keigo threw nonsense questions at Dabi to see how he would react to them. Of course, Keigo already knew all of the answers, in part anyway, but he wanted to see how this villain would crack under the pressure. The hero's fingers vibrated in Dabi's lowest ribs as his thumbs massaged in two places on his lean belly. Keigo tried not to look for too long at the villain's contracting abs.
Dabi's limbs were restless in their quest to try and weasel their way out of this situation; his legs and arms squirming and wrestling against the restraints. Dabi's fists balled up to try and fight the maddening tingling sensations, and his hips bucked up like the bronco he was only to slam down on the table once more. Keigo felt like he was tickling the riding bull you find in dive bars and the like.
"I SAHAHAID I DOHOHON'T KNOHOHOW THE FUHUHUCKING KID!! YOU GAHAHAHA!-" Dabi's deep rumbling laughter soon turned into high pitched hysterical giggles. Keigo's crimson wings had accidentally fluttered over the criminal's belly as he had shifted in his place. Keigo looked back at his magnificent wings and soon had a horrible look shadow over his face. The hero's fingers stilled once more as he plucked a feather out from his own wing. Dabi's cyan eyes were rolled to the back of his head as he laid limp on the table; his mouth open and sucking in as much oxygen as possible.
"I don't think that's gonna cut it, Patches. I want real answers, not this tippy-toe bullshit you keep pulling on me. I'm gonna get what I'm looking for even if it means I have to kill you." His voice was deep and serious enough for Dabi to perk up and look at him. Dabi didn't care about dying; he even welcomed it at this point just to get out of this damn table. Dabi turned sharply towards his collarbone and coughed into his shoulder. A regular cough wouldn't hurt unless it was a virus, but Dabi's hyper-sensitive insides made this cough burn up his parched throat. The villain looked back with a newfound seriousness and tried not to look too terrified at the slim wiggling feather in the hero's hand.
"Ask the multiple personalities dude or the blonde psycho bitch! They're always up to some random bullshit that doesn't involve me. I only live by Stain's ideologies and live up to the expectations to make the future he wanted to be realized. Child abduction isn't gonna make that future happen!" Even Dabi could hear the desperation in his own voice; he wanted to kill Hawks for making him so vulnerable. Especially while the hero was looking down at him with that damn lazy smirk, like this was all too amusing for him.
Keigo took a long breath and twirled the feather in between his fingers; his lips quirked in that thinking look once more. Dabi's eyes couldn't tear away from the hypnotizing piece of tickling equipment. The blonde hero could tell that Dabi was getting shrill, and distraught at that. He was getting there; with just a little more pushing Keigo could possibly unlock Dabi's memories and make him see that HE was Touya Todoroki himself. That's what all of this was.
"Mmmm... not convinced. Sorry, when it comes to child abduction cases like these, pointing fingers won't help when I know YOU'RE the child abductor. Just a matter of time until you wanna admit it to me. But hey, at least it's fun torture and not a messy one, right? A few things I have to do before we get started up again though-" Keigo stepped forward and tucked his feather in the crest of Dabi's ear like he was holding a pencil there.
"Hold onto that for a second," Keigo said simply as he lifted Dabi's thin cotton shirt and lifted it up over his head.
"As soon as I get out of these restraints, you're bones are gonna be liquefied inside of your damn disgusting body." Dabi hissed, while Keigo wasn't paying attention to that and staring directly at Dabi's impressive toned six-pack. Dabi followed Keigo's gaze and blushed deeply at the realization. Keigo suddenly snapped out of it and reanimated himself.
"Oh, well, in that case. I'll just put more on you so that doesn't have to happen!" Keigo flashed Dabi a squinted smile and took the straps that lay on either side of Dabi's hips. Keigo pulled on the leather belt tightly so now his midsection couldn't buck in any direction. The belt also helped pull Dabi's diamond navel taut. Dabi's belly and entire torso were unmarked with his scars; the scars only curving over his sides and disappearing under his pants. Keigo also noted that Dabi's hips were deep and indented, like someone pressed their thumbs into them. They must be really warm and hopefully very sensitive at this rate-
Keigo cleared his throat and stole back his feather with a wink while he was face to face with Dabi, to which Dabi attempted to headbutt the birdman. It was then that Dabi realized that with the belt now strapped just above his belly button, any wiggling room that he had before had just evaporated.
"Realizing just how fucked you are? And the effects of the serum don't start depleting until the victim's body has cooled down. The victim's body cooldown tells the serum that the job has been finished and the Hero's have the information they're looking for. Until then, it lasts as long as it needs to." After Keigo's helpful explanation, Dabi then noticed just how hot his body actually was, like he was running a high fever. Which meant that the serum was probably running at it's highest potent capacity to keep him horribly hyper-sensitive to any and all touches. Keigo watched the realization play over Dabi's face as he stepped forward and started circling his wiggly feather over Dabi's belly button.
Dabi jerked immediately and clamped his teeth down to prevent any giggles from slipping out. Keigo watched with a newfound sadistic hunger; he watched with the sudden drive to make this man shout his lungs out and regret ever forgetting about his childhood best friend.
"This can all stop if you just tell me where the kid is. Just give me a location and I'll send the heroes on their way. I got a phone right here. I got heroes at my disposal. We're just waiting on you, Patchwork." Keigo continued to circle and even started sweeping his feather across Dabi's strip of belly like he was dusting a piece of furniture.
Dabi shook his head and kept his laughter caged in his chest. The single feather was so tingly that he wanted to crawl out of his skin. "I mmph- I t-tohold yohou! I- grrmmph- I-I don't knohow ahahanything about the kid! I never heheard his nahame before!" Dabi involuntarily thought back to Touya Todoroki's name, the damn kid that he was being tortured over. In Dabi's haze, he thought he remembered the Bakugou brat having a friend named Todoroki-
"Wahait wait wait! I-I-I remember something! I reeheemehember sohohomething I promise!" Dabi pleaded, Keigo taking immediate pity and stopping his red wiggly feather. Keigo pointed his feather like an accusing sword towards Dabi's face.
"If the information is bullshit, you're getting a second dose injected right in your belly button. Imagine that hell burning in your stomach. Think about this wisely." Dabi swallowed what felt like cotton balls in his throat. He didn't know if Keigo was bullshitting or not, but he also didn't know if he could trust his own memories. He's never been able to remember too much of anything past his twenties... Dabi's shaking fingers hardened into fists as he hardened his resolve to get out of this table.
"Okay okay... The Touya kid has a brother right? Todoroki? What's the half and half kid's name? Shoto? Yeah, it was Shoto. Go fucking torture him for answers instead of me you damn prick! He knows more about his own brother than I do-" At the sound of the repeated use of the word 'brother', a flash of red hair jumped past Dabi's vision. Keigo shook his head and was starting to step forward to tickle the criminal's belly once more before Dabi hurriedly stopped him. "Woah Woah Woah Woah Woah, hold on, hold on! The Touya kid had red hair! Instead of half and half like his brother, he had all red hair." And white hair with red strips, and blank white hair like the snow- Dabi involuntarily remembered this as well, but before he could grab onto it, it slid away.
Keigo had a pleased look on his face, however. Dabi was starting to remember bits and pieces of the past, and that's what Keigo wanted. Just a little bit further, and hopefully he would remember who he was.
"Finally, we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately, no cookies for you. We know Touya had red hair, his family comes from a line of gingers. We need to know where the kid is, Dabi. And you're the only one with the answers. So let's hear 'em." Dabi fought the urge to protest as Keigo willed about six of his feathers to detach from his wings and dust over Dabi's belly, while Keigo's fingers gripped his sides and scribbled his manicured nails into them. Dabi pulled on his restraints and cackled loudly into the sound-proof room.
"CHRIHIHIHIST!! I DOHOHON'T KNOHOHOHOW AHAHAHANYTHING!! LET ME GOHOHOHO!!" Dabi's eyes screwed shut as his mouth was agape with his hysterical laughter. Both Hawks and Dabi were unaware that the reserved and quiet male could produce such sounds. Dabi's veins stood out like cords against his neck as his chest heaved in with his laughter. Such small stimulus is driving him insane, Hawks thought to himself. Six of his feathers from his crimson wings were dusting over his belly and his navel, while his fingers scratched and scraped over the villains pronounced ribcage. Sure, maybe it was a little intense in terms of tickling, but he thought that this would be too easy for the hardened villain. Apparently not; Hawks could see that Dabi was fighting for breath already.
"HAHAHAHAWKS I SWEAHAHAHAHA-" Dabi cut his own laughter short with a hard snort. One of the fluffy crimson feathers had started twirling itself into Dabi's stretched navel. There was nowhere that the villain could twist on the table to escape its feathery clutches. Hawks cracked half a smile. Even if he were to take his hands off the villain's ribcage to halt his fingers tickling, which he did; Dabi still produced the same amount of crazed hysterical cackles from just the feathers tickling. The double agent stood with his arms folded and watched his childhood best friend laugh an insane amount.
The villain had tousled his onyx crown all over his eyes; the once fluffy hair now a dense mop against his forehead. Dabi's smile was agape enough that Keigo could see his glinting incisors. His biceps flexed and struggled; the sweeping of the crimson feathers not ceasing for a moment. They traced over his waistline, the deep cavernous dips of his hip indents, fluttering over the small pinch of skin underneath his navel. Keigo stood fascinated by the scene, while Dabi's eyes started rolling in the back of his head.
"-AHAHAHAP!! I'LL-I'LL TAHAHAHAHALK I PROHOHOMISE!" That roused Keigo out of his stupor. He forgot that Dabi was in an extremely sensitive situation. The agent quickly halted his feathers and lifted them up from Dabi's belly. The feathers had worked so fervently that the villain's hypersensitive skin was a baby pink on the surface of it. Dabi sniffed back his tears of mirth and heaved in delicious clean oxygen. It was ice cold in his lungs, but the villain much preferred it over the sweaty ticklish hell he was just subjected to.
"Alright, Staples. Get to talking then, or there's gonna be a lot more feathers where that came from. You don't want these puppies all over you in the situation you're in." Keigo flapped his wings and shook them out to showcase his entire wingspan of crimson ticklers, all individually flowing and wiggling delicately in the air. Dabi gave him a death glare, but even the feathers made him gulp. The villain flexed his fingers as he tried to think up of something that this douche didn't already know about the kid. Keigo could see the villain's brain working to think up a bullshit story just to appease him. That just meant more tickles for-
"He-He was 15 when he went missing. His father had abused him when he was young and he was shunned by his siblings. His mother tried to protect him but-" But she was crazy. And no one protected him. He was the forgotten one, the one who faded into the background. And no one had a problem with that.
Dabi choked on his words, clearing his throat and clearing his mind. Keigo watched with interest as Dabi had spilled all of this information from thin air. Even the villain looked confused, he didn't know where this revelation came from.
"Mm-hmm, quite the truth serum this stuff is, isn't it? Just a little bit more and you can get off this table and get yourself an ice cream." Dabi shot his gaze up to Keigo's eyes and pulled on his restraints.
"N-No! No more I can't handle it! It's too much! Don't do this!" For some reason Dabi didn't even sound convincing to his own ears. Maybe because even he knew that no matter how much pleading he tried, he wouldn't get out of this until he coughed up more information. Keigo looked quite amused by the display, however. That fox's grin was back on his face.
"Come on now, it can't be that bad, little patch~ It's just some tickling afterall." Dabi's heart stopped when Keigo walked up to him and gently placed his fingers on Dabi's waistline. "Little kid games, right Blueflame? You can handle it." Keigo suddenly gripped Dabi's right hip and squished his thumb inside, making Dabi curl up and giggle like a schoolboy.
"Gahahahad! Hahahaha-Hahahaow mahahahany tihihihimes?!" "How many times what? How many times do I have to tickle tickle tickle you before you get the gist of your situation? You're not getting out of this until I get my answers, kid. So cough 'em up, before you cough up a lung." Even holding Dabi's hip like this made the villain squeal out. His hips bucked and shook in their binds, which only drove the hero's thumb in further to his divet.
"I dohohohon't knohohohow anything! I-I cahahan't rehehember!" Hawks could see that Dabi was actively trying to remember something, he wasn't lying in a situation like this. And Keigo wasn't wanting him to remember his childhood trauma or to relive it in any way, he just wanted his childhood best friend to remember him. Hawks took a deep breath in his lungs and decided to up the anty. Hawks sent four crimson feathers up to Dabi's stretched armpits, the wiggling plumes fluffing over the villain's soft divets. Dabi started to shriek, but Hawks suddenly slid his hands down to Dabi's thighs and squished into the soft material.
Dabi must have unlocked a second quirk along with his Cremate abilities, because Hawks had never heard such an unearthly howl thrash itself from Dabi's chest. Keigo winced from the piercing sounds from the villain as Dabi's eyes were screwed tightly in hysterical cackles with tears budding in the corners of his eyes. The feathers twisting and fluffing in his stretched armpits along with Hawks kneading up and down his toned thighs had the villain in tears. Dabi didn't know which way to buck, to twist, to jump on the table. He was stuck either leaning into the fluffy feathers for more relentless dusting, or to literally push himself into his captors hands for closer and more effective squeezing.
"Looks like you're in a pickle, bud. I say just cough up the information and be done with the whole thing but, to each their own, right? If you like it, you like it. I won't judge, I'm having way too much fun~" Keigo had his thumbs fixed to the villains inner thighs as his other eight fingers splayed out as wide as they could stretch to squeeze and grip the skin underneath Dabi's jeans. Dabi wanted to tear his hot tingling skin off with how insane the sensations were.
"SHUHUHUT THE FUHUHUHUCK-GAHAHAHAHAD!! AHAHAHAHAHAHA NAHAHAHA!!" Dabi was screaming at this rate, the man's throat parched and raw from the yelling. Keigo rolled his eyes at the exclamations of his victim when something silver flashed in his eye. Keigo thought it was probably just the restraints glinting off the light in the room, but it was Dabi's stitches that caught his eye. Keigo suddenly had a stroke of curiosity and reached behind him to pluck a feather from his wings and swiped the fluffy appendage across Dabi's silver stitch.
It was liked the criminal was electrified, his body jolting like it touched a live current and his insane cackles jumped an octave with the single swipe. Dabi's stitches had already been sensitive to touch even before he had the serum in his body. Now the nerve endings underneath the stitch felt like it was intertwined with the silver itself. Keigo bit his lip at the torture that was to come. Watching Dabi writhe on the table with the feathers in his armpits, Keigo sent six feathers to every visible stitch on the mans body and let the appendages fluff and dust and wriggle all over him. They were twirling in his ears and driving in his collarbones; they were doing figure eights in his armpits and dragging up his triceps; they were skating down his sides and writing nonsense with their quills down the lines of his abs.
"GOHOHOHOD!! SAHAHAHAVE MEHEHEHEE!! PLEHEHEHEHEASE!! I-I'M DHYHYHYHYING!!" It was a horribly dramatic thing to exclaim that Keigo should have listened to, but the way the bird saw it, if Dabi still had breath in his lungs to shout, then he should be fine. Keigo's never seen such a contorted face on anyone before. It was a mix of childlike happiness and mirth with pure anguish and torture. But, whatever gets the truth out, Keigo supposed. It was only a matter of time before Dabi choked on the truth. And Keigo could never get enough of the sight of Dabi's abs contracting with every giggly laugh harvested from his chest.
"KEHEEHEEHEE-KEIGO!! KEHEHEHEEIGO PLEHEHEHEHEASE!! STOHOHOHOHOP!! I-I REEHEEMEMBER!! STAHAHAHAP IHIHIHIHIT!!" Dabi suddenly erupted his confession once Keigo neared his bucking kneecaps with his own fingers. Keigo's feathers and hands suddenly halted; the villains heart bursting through his ribcage. The poor captured man had aching ribs and a sore stomach, and his limbs were irritated from pulling on them for so long. Hawks stood with his hands on his hips. His entire body shivered with flashes and icicles, his searing hot sweat sliding down his icy back. It was complete hell, but the stimulus was enough to break the barrier of his lost memories. This was it. Dabi just needed to remember where he came from and who he used to be. Maybe he'd be more cheerful, or at least a little more...anything, at this point.
Dabi's head was laid back on the table, his body slightly curled up in the small defense he had. His eyes were rolled up to the whites in exhaustion. But in the swirling chaotic blackness behind his eyelids that he was used to, he saw something new. Something he hasn't appreciated in a long time.
Summer, the scalding heat on the back of my neck, the taste of ice-cold popsicles, the sand inbetween my toes. Being the kid with the dad who pushed them the highest on the swingset. My scraped knees and elbows patched up by the smiling boy. The summer festival and the exploding fireworks in the infinite sky above me. My best friend who stood there to watch when nobody else would. Keigo, my best friend. His toothy smile and his squinting eyes; his untied shoelaces and messy hair. He never left my side. But I left his.
Suddenly I don't feel so heavy. I don't feel so alone, so burdened with this weight on my chest. Because I know Keigo is there. He always was.
"And I always will be, Touya." Dabi slowly looked up to see Keigo with a gentle smile on his face. Dabi hadn't realized that he was speaking aloud. Hawks turned to Dabi's right arm and started setting free his aching wrist. But after this newest revelation, Dabi didn't feel hurt anymore. He felt like a completed puzzle; the lost piece that made him whole was finally inserted. Dabi held his wrist to his chest and rubbed over his tingling body to rid himself of the leftover sensations.
"T-Trauma's a bitch, huh? It...Itmade me forget my best friend, the only one who was truly there for me. I'm...I'm sorry about that, Keigo." Keigo shook his head, his bangs swaying back and forth. "Please, don't be sorry. It's your dad that should apologize. I just wanted you to remember everything that was bright in your life, and not live in this bleak purgatory. You have friends and people who care about you. And you used to smile all the time, you know. I know it's not your fault that you forgot who you were and you forgot how to smile. But now at least, maybe you can put your past to good use in the future."
Dabi nodded, understanding Keigo's words better than he would have thought. Keigo extended his hand out to Dabi to help him off of the table. Dabi hesitated for a moment, a good second passing before he grabbed it and hopped off the table. Dabi was still slightly curled and hunched even as he walked, his defenses still not lowered after that episode.
"Don't worry, it's all over. No more tickles, I promise. Unless you kinda liked it, then I can give you more. I thought I saw you leaning in for some more now and again on the table. You also remember how ticklish you used to be and you still are, right? I mean, I thought something this childish was gonna work on ya dude, but your vocal cords must be thrashed-"
"Yeah, you know what, Keegs, I think I remember just how ticklish you used to be as well when you were a kid. Care to test it out?" Dabi picked up one of the syringes off the table filled with the swirling blue sensitivity serum with a horribly antagonizing look in his eyes.
Keigo gulped and ran for dear life.
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Long before she decided to help others eat better by becoming a dietitian, Jessica Wilson learned that the profession was unlikely to offer much to people like her.
Growing up as a Black girl in a mostly white area of Sacramento, Calif., she was bullied for her size and subjected to unpleasant visits with dietitians, who taught portion control with the aid of unappetizing plastic models of green beans and chicken breasts.
In her dietetics program at the University of California, Davis, Ms. Wilson was the only Black student. A single day was devoted to what the curriculum called “ethnic diets.” “It was not, ‘These are interesting and awesome,’” she recalled. “It is, ‘These are why these diets are bad. Next class.’”
Mexican food was dismissed as greasy. Indian food was heavy. Ms. Wilson was taught to prescribe a bland “kale-and-quinoa” diet. When she started treating patients — including many who, like her, are people of color or identify as queer — she learned how much those identities informed their perspectives on health, and how little she’d been taught about that.
“It makes people feel so guilty for not being able to eat what Goop would recommend,” said Ms. Wilson, 38. “I was no longer able to use the tools that had been given to me in school with good conscience.”
As the coronavirus pandemic has made Americans more aware of their health and eating habits, many have turned to registered dietitians like Ms. Wilson (or to nutritionists, who are not always required to obtain a specific education or certification). Yet the advice they get can sometimes seem more tailored to some past era than to the motley, multicultural nation the United States is in 2020.
In recent years — and particularly in the last several months, amid the national discussion about race — many dietitians have begun speaking out and reimagining the practice in a more inclusive way, often without institutional support.
Today, Ms. Wilson counsels many people of color on eating a healthy diet based on the foods they grew up with and love. Hazel Ng, 48, who runs a private practice in Alhambra, Calif., has created handouts for her Chinese clients that showcase produce found in Asian grocery stores, like bitter melon and lychees
In June, Sherene Chou, 36, a dietitian with a private practice in Los Angeles, organized a group letter to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — the largest and most powerful organization for food and nutrition professionals — outlining steps it should take to address systemic racism in the field, including antiracism training and more support for people of color. Leaders of numerous dietetics groups lent their support, signing the letter on behalf of 70,000 practitioners and students.
Many of these dietitians say the academy’s research, programs and articles ignore non-Western cuisines, or imply that they are unhealthy. They feel the profession places too much emphasis on consuming less and not enough on understanding individual eating habits. And, they add, it perpetuates an ideal of thinness and gender normativity that can exclude different body types and identities.
“It is a good-old-girls’ club where, as a person of color, you have to do so much to be invited,” said Jessica Jones, a dietitian in Richmond, Calif., and a founder of the inclusive dietetics website Food Heaven.
In response to these criticisms, the academy said it is working hard to broaden its ranks and resources to better reflect different cultures.
“Like other professions in health care and countless other fields, nutrition and dietetics has for many years experienced underrepresentation by persons of color in its membership and leadership ranks,” it said in a statement last week. “The academy knows change will not happen overnight. Still, we are making real progress that will create permanent change in our organization, our profession and our communities.”
The group is influential in setting the United States Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines that Americans are urged to follow; its members make up half of the 20-member committee that oversees those recommendations. In a July report, the committee acknowledged that the dietary approaches it studies don’t “qualitatively address cultural variations in intake patterns,” yet said the resulting guidelines allow a “tremendous amount of flexibility” that allows them to be tailored to an individual’s cultural and taste preferences.
The recipe database on MyPlate, the agriculture department’s healthy-eating website, includes 98 dishes classified as “American,” but just 28 “Asian” recipes and nine “Middle Eastern” ones. Though it lists 122 “Latin American/Hispanic” recipes, they include dishes like a “skinny pizza” made with tortillas. The Asian recipes include “Oriental Rice” and “Oriental Sweet and Sour Vegetables.”(A spokesman for the department said that “expanding the recipe database and other MyPlate consumer resources to reflect more diversity is one of our top priorities.”)
If the options seem narrow, they may begin with the narrowness of the profession. More than 71 percent of the nation’s roughly 106,000 registered dietitians are non-Hispanic white, according to the academy’s Commission on Dietetic Registration. Nearly 84 percent are women.
Entry requirements are steep: Practitioners must earn a degree from an accredited program, complete an internship (sometimes unpaid) or a supervised learning program, and pass a registration exam with a $200 entrance fee. Starting in 2024, a graduate degree will be required to take the exam.
“This is an expensive profession, with no guarantee that you are going to have a high salary,” said Lisa Sasson, a professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University. She called the new graduate-degree mandate “unconscionable” and “an even greater barrier to people of color in our profession.”
The academy said that its charitable foundation provided more than $500,000 in scholarships and grants from 2017 to 2019 “for diverse individuals within the field,” and that those funds continue to grow.
Internships are highly competitive, and some even require the intern to pay. Alice Figueroa, 33, who runs a private practice in the East Village of Manhattan, said she struggled to afford food during her internship, even as she was advising others how to eat. Evelyn Crayton, 74, who was the academy’s first Black president, said many of the people in charge of matching students with internships are white, and may be more likely to select applicants who look like them.
Funding for dietetics programs at many historically Black colleges and universities, including Fort Valley State University and Grambling State University, has been cut since the 1970s. The number of Black dietitians fell by 18 percent, to 1,107, from 1998 to 2019, according to the academy’s Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics.
Even when Dr. Crayton was president of the academy, in 2015 and 2016, she felt out of step with its other leaders. “I have heard that behind my back they called me an angry Black woman, because I raised questions,” she said. Her nominations of Black dietitians for leadership roles, she added, were frequently snubbed.
Told of her comments, the academy responded, “We were not aware of this until now, and we are very saddened to hear that Evelyn was subjected to these inexcusable statements. They do not reflect the academy’s core values and we are moving swiftly to investigate this matter.”
The profession’s exclusivity goes beyond race. Kai Iguchi, 28, a dietitian working at Rogers Behavioral Health in Oconomowoc, Wis., didn’t feel comfortable coming out as nonbinary to graduate-school classmates. “When the program itself as a culture is very cisgender, thin, white and female,” they said, “it is hard to be different and succeed.”
Mx. Iguchi said what they learned at school did little to address the unique problems that transgender and nonbinary clients face — being misgendered by their dietitians and family members, or feeling discomfort with overtly feminine imagery on health materials. Adult transgender people are also at high risk of developing eating disorders, according to a 2019 study by the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Even some dietitians who teach the standard curriculum find it wanting. “I have reached my limit with my textbook,” said Maya Feller, an adjunct professor in nutrition at New York University, adding that it doesn’t take into account social factors that often explain why people of color are disproportionally affected by health issues.
She said she was also unhappy with educational resources like MyPlate, which recommends meals like salmon, brown rice and broccoli, but not the curried chana and doubles served by her mother, who grew up in Trinidad. (After her interview for this article, Ms. Feller was hired as a consultant to help make MyPlate more inclusive.)
“If I saw that plate and then looked at my doubles, I would be like, ‘Well, my food is no good.’”
Ms. Feller, 43, tries instead to promote an “ongoing and consistent education around cultural humility” — not telling patients what they can’t eat, but considering the foods they have access to, and embracing, not stigmatizing, their cultural preferences.
It rankles Ryan Bad Heart Bull, 36, a Native American dietitian who works with the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge, S.D., that many of his peers praise the nutritional value of traditional Indigenous ingredients like salmon and bison, without understanding how federal government policies have made it harder for Native Americans to hunt and forage on their own land. To be ignorant of this cultural and historical context, “and then to turn around and say bison meat is one of the best meats you can eat and here are the ways you can incorporate it into your diet,” he said, “it is insulting and saddening.”
In 2019, he published a guide for the American Indian Cancer Foundation to educate Native cancer survivors about the nutritional value of their traditional foods.
Diksha Gautham, 27, a nutritionist in San Francisco, tells her mostly South Asian-American clientele that a healthy diet can include palak paneer and aloo tikki. As a child, she said, she harbored a blind perception that anything that wasn’t dry chicken and broccoli, including the dal and rice her mother cooked, “was bad for me.” No nutritional database she has encountered includes Indian ingredients, so she created her own guides to healthful Indian food.
A Toronto dietitian, Nazima Qureshi, 29, has self-published “The Healthy Ramadan Guide” with her husband, Belal Hafeez, a personal trainer. It includes meal plans that adhere to fasting guidelines, with recipes like stuffed dates and za’atar roasted chicken, and exercises to give people energy going into daily prayers.
Some of Dalina Soto’s Hispanic and Asian clients in the Philadelphia area have been told by other dietitians that they can’t eat white rice. “They shut down,” she said. “Either they go way to the extreme, where they are no longer eating any of their cultural foods, or the other side is, ‘I am just not going to manage my disease.’”
“My goal is to bring them in the middle,” said Ms. Soto, 32. She’ll suggest a salad alongside their rice and beans.
Still, many of these practitioners feel frustrated as they try to nudge the dietetic establishment toward change.
The profession is governed by the academy’s board. One subsidiary organization, the Commission on Dietetic Registration, sets professional requirements and fees; another, the Accreditation Council, certifies programs. Together, these entities and their majority-white leadership act as gatekeepers, their critics argue, limiting deep-rooted change.
The academy, which has about 100,000 members, funds research and hosts the largest annual conference for dietitians, the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo. In 2016, it announced the Second Century Initiative, an effort to expand its reach and teachings around the globe.
The academy has had a diversity and inclusion committee since 1987. But, like all the academy’s committees, it is filled by volunteers. Teresa Turner, 37, a member from 2015 until May, said the academy offers the panel few “resources or benchmarks.” “Its only purpose,” Ms. Turner said, “is to make the academy look like they are doing something.”
The academy denied those assertions, saying the committee plays an active role, recommending strategies to recruit people from underrepresented groups to join the profession, and the academy, and promote their advancement.
A group that calls itself Audit the Academy (whose members include Ms. Turner, Ms. Figueroa and Ms. Chou) said the academy research it has seen is largely conducted by white dietitians studying nondiverse populations; if they study communities of color, they often do so from a white perspective. Members also see little representation of transgender and nonbinary people.
“If we are invisible in the research,” said Sand Chang, 42, an Oakland, Calif., psychologist who specializes in the transgender health and eating disorders, “we are going to be invisible in assessment and treatment.”
The academy, however, said it “offers materials, programs and educational opportunities to help its members provide care to a diverse array of clients,” including articles about treating transgender individuals.
In June, the organization responded to pressure from disaffected members by committing to developing action plans to address inequities in the profession. It has created a new Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group, and conducted virtual forums to hear the concerns of 126 randomly selected members.
Shannon Curtis, 30, a Houston dietitian who helped found a group called Dietitians for Change, attended one of the sessions. “Although it was empowering to know that we are not the only ones screaming about this,” she said, “it was kind of a waste of time, in my opinion, because I am not exactly confident that they will take this information and put it into an action plan they will actually act on.”
Other organizations have emerged to address the inequities in the profession, like Diversify Dietetics, founded in 2018 by Tamara Melton and Deanna Belleny. It offers resources like mentors and educational materials to help students of color pass the registration exam.
In response to criticisms that it is harder for nonwhite dietitians to succeed in the profession, the academy offered an interview with Kristen Gradney, a senior director at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, La, and one of several registered dietitian nutritionists who speak on behalf of the academy.
Ms. Gradney, 40, said that while the academy “has really missed the mark” in preparing dietitians to deal with diverse populations, it is starting to make progress. Still, she said “true change” would probably not come from the academy, but from grass-roots initiatives like Diversify Dietetics, where she serves on the advisory board.
In 2018, Dr. Crayton, the academy’s past president, hosted a conference in Montgomery, Ala., where she lives, for World Critical Dietetics, an organization that champions a more inclusive approach to dietetics. Panels discussed the role that unconscious bias plays in education, and whether the registration exam was fair to all students.
Dr. Crayton took participants to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, where in 1965, peaceful protesters marched for civil rights. “I could never have done that with the academy,” she said with a laugh. She said events like that could help pave a path toward sweeping change.
“I don’t know how to get to people’s hearts, but it is a heart thing,” she said. In a discipline that deals with such a deeply personal matter — one’s eating habits — “there has to be a change of heart, where people really feel empathy for groups who they are trying to include.”
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Rivera, Kahlo, and the Detroit Murals: A History and a Personal Journey
The year 1932 was not a good time to come to Detroit, Michigan. The Great Depression cast dark clouds over the city. Scores of factories had ground to a halt, hungry people stood in breadlines, and unemployed autoworkers were selling apples on street corners to survive. In late April that year, against this grim backdrop, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo stepped off a train at the cavernous Michigan Central depot near the heart of the Motor City. They were on their way to the new Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a symbol of the cultural ascendancy of the city and its turbo-charged prosperity in better times. The next 11 months in Detroit would take them both to dazzling artistic heights and transform them personally in far-reaching, at times traumatic, ways.
I subtitle this article “a history and a personal journey.” The history looks at the social context of Diego and Frida’s defining time in the city and the art they created; the personal journey explores my own relationship to Detroit and the murals Rivera painted there. I was born and raised in the city, listening to the sounds of its bustling streets, coming of age in its diverse neighborhoods, growing up with the driving beat of its music, and living in the shadows of its factories. Detroit was a labor town with a culture of social justice and civil rights, which on occasion clashed with sharp racism and powerful corporations that defined the age. In my early twenties, I served a four-year apprenticeship to become a machine repair machinist in a sprawling multistory General Motors auto factory at Clark Street and Michigan Avenue that machined mammoth seven-liter V8 engines, stamped auto body parts on giant presses, and assembled gleaming Cadillacs on fast-moving assembly lines. At the time, the plant employed some 10,000 workers who reflected the racial and ethnic diversity of the city, as well as its tensions. The factory was located about a 20-minute walk from where Diego and Frida got off the train decades earlier but was a world away from the downtown skyscrapers and the city’s cultural center.
I grew up with Rivera’s murals, and they have run through every stage of my life. I’ve been gone from the city for many years now, but an important part of both Detroit and the murals have remained with me, and I suspect they always will. I return to Detroit frequently, and no matter how busy the trip, I have almost always found time for the murals.
In Detroit, Rivera looked outwards, seeking to capture the soul of the city, the intense dynamism of the auto industry, and the dignity of the workers who made it run. He would later say that these murals were his finest work. In contrast, Kahlo looked inward, developing a haunting new artistic direction. The small paintings and drawings she created in Detroit pull the viewer into a strange and provocative universe. She denied being a Surrealist, but when André Breton, a founder of the movement, met her in Mexico, he compared her work to a “ribbon around a bomb” that detonated unparalleled artistic freedom (Hellman & Ross, 1938).
Rivera, at the height of his fame, embraced Detroit and was exhilarated by the rhythms and power of its factories (I must admit these many years later I can relate to that response). He was fascinated by workers toiling on assembly lines and coal-fired blast furnaces pouring molten metal around the clock. He felt this industrial base had the potential to create material abundance and lay the foundation for a better world. Sixty percent of the world’s automobiles were built in Michigan at that time, and Detroit also boasted other state-of-the-art industry, from the world’s largest stove and furnace factory to the main research laboratories for a global pharmaceutical company.
“Detroit has many uncommon aspects,” a Michigan guidebook produced by the Federal Writers Project pointed out, “the staring rows of ghostly blue factory windows at night; the tired faces of auto workers lighted up by simultaneous flares of match light at the end of the evening shift; and the long, double-decker trucks carrying auto bodies and chassis” (WPA, 1941:234). This project produced guidebooks for every state in the nation and was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal Agency that sought to create jobs for the unemployed, including writers and artists. I suspect Rivera would have embraced the approach, perhaps even painted it, had it then existed.
Detroit was a rough-hewn town that lacked the glitter and sophistication of New York or the charm of San Francisco, yet Rivera was inspired by what he saw. In his “Detroit Industry” murals on the soaring inner walls of a large courtyard in the center of the DIA, Rivera portrayed the iconic Ford Rouge plant, the world’s largest and most advanced factory at the time. “[These] frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote eight decades later (Smith, 2015).
The city did not speak to Kahlo in the same way. She tolerated Detroit — sometimes barely, other times with more enthusiasm — rather than embracing it. Kahlo was largely unknown when she came to Detroit and felt somewhat isolated and disconnected there. She painted and drew, explored the city’s streets, and watched films — she liked Chaplin’s comedies in particular — in the movie theaters near the center of the city, but she admitted “the industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting side” (Coronel, 2015:138).
During a personally traumatic year — she had a miscarriage that went seriously awry in Detroit, and her mother died in Mexico City — she looked deeply into herself and painted searing, introspective works on small canvases. In Detroit, she emerged as the Frida Kahlo who is recognized and revered throughout the world today. While Vogue still identified her as “Madame Diego Rivera” during her first New York exhibition in 1938, the New York Times commented that “no woman in art history commands her popular acclaim” in a 2019 article (Hellman & Ross, 1938; Farago, 2019).
My emphasis will be on Rivera and the “Detroit Industry” murals, but Kahlo’s own work, unheralded at the time, has profoundly resonated with new audiences since. While in Detroit, they both inspired, supported, influenced, and needed each other.
Prelude
Diego and Frida married in Mexico on August 21, 1929. He was 43, and she was 22 — although their maturity, in her view, was inverse to their age. Their love was passionate and tumultuous from the beginning. “I suffered two accidents in my life,” she later wrote, “one in which a streetcar knocked me down … the other accident is Diego” (Rosenthal, 2015:96).
They shared a passion for Mexico, particularly the country’s indigenous roots, and a deep commitment to politics, looking to the ideals of communism in a turbulent and increasingly dangerous world (Rosenthal, 2015:19). Rivera painted a major set of murals — 235 panels — in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City between 1923 and 1928. When he signed each panel, he included a small red hammer and sickle to underscore his political allegiance. Among the later panels was “In the Arsenal,” which included images of Frida Kahlo handing out weapons, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in a hat with a red star, and Italian photographer Tina Modotti holding a bandolier.
The politics of Rivera and Kahlo ran deep but didn’t exactly follow a straight line. Kahlo herself remarked that Rivera “never worried about embracing contradictions” (Rosenthal, 2015:55). In fact, he seemed to embody F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (Fitzgerald, 1936).
Their art, however, ultimately defined who they were and usually came out on top when in conflict with their politics. When the Mexican Communist Party was sharply at odds with the Mexican government in the late 1920s, Rivera, then a Party member, nonetheless accepted a major government commission to paint murals in public buildings. The Party promptly expelled him for this act, among other transgressions (Rosenthal, 2015:32).
Diego and Frida came to San Francisco in November 1930 after Rivera received a commission to paint a mural in what was then the San Francisco Stock Exchange. He had already spent more than a decade in Europe and another nine months in the Soviet Union in 1927. In contrast, this was Kahlo’s first trip outside Mexico. The physical setting in San Francisco, then as now, was stunning — steep hills at the end of a peninsula between the Pacific and the Bay — and they were intrigued and elated just to be there. The city had a bohemian spirit and a working-class grit. Artists and writers could mingle with longshoremen in bars and cafes as ships from around the world unloaded at the bustling piers. At the time, California was in the midst of an “enormous vogue of things Mexican,” and the couple was at the center of this mania (Rosenthal, 2015:32). They were much in demand at seemingly endless “parties, dinners, and receptions” during their seven-month stay (Rosenthal, 2015:36). A contradiction with their political views? Not really. Rivera felt he was infiltrating the heart of capitalism with more radical ideas.
Rivera’s commission produced a fresco on the walls of the Pacific Stock Exchange, “Allegory of California” (1931), a paean to the economic dynamism of the state despite the dark economic clouds already descending. Rivera would then paint several additional commissions in San Francisco before leaving. While compelling, these murals lacked the power and political edge of his earlier work in Mexico or the extraordinary genius of what was to come in Detroit.
While in San Francisco, Rivera and Kahlo met Helen Wills Moody, a 27-year-old world-class tennis player, who became the central model for the Allegory mural. She moved in rarified social and artistic circles, and as 1930 drew to a close, she introduced the couple to Wilhelm Valentiner, the visionary director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), who had rushed to San Francisco to meet Rivera when he learned of the artist’s arrival.
Valentiner was “a German scholar, a Rembrandt specialist, and a man with extraordinarily wide tastes,” according to Graham W.J. Beal, who himself revitalized the DIA as director in the 21st century. “Between 1920 and the early 1930s, with the help of Detroit’s personal wealth and city money, Valentiner transformed the DIA … into one of the half-dozen top art collections in the country,” a position the museum continues to hold today (Beal, 2010:34). The museum director and the artist shared an unusual kinship. “The revolutions in Germany and Mexico [had] radicalized [both],” wrote Linda Downs, a noted curator at the DIA (Downs, 2015:177). Little more than a decade later, “the idea of the mural commission reinvigorated them to create a highly charged monumental modern work that has contributed greatly to the identity of Detroit” (Downs, 2015:177).
When Valentiner and Rivera met, the economic fallout of the Depression was hammering both Detroit and its municipally funded art institute. The city was teetering at the edge of bankruptcy in 1932 and had slashed its contribution to the museum from $170,000 to $40,000, with another cut on the horizon. Despite this dismal economic terrain, Valentiner was able to arrange a commission for Rivera to paint two large-format frescoes in the Garden Court at the new museum building, which had opened in 1927. Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford and a major patron of the DIA, pledged $10,000 for the project — a truly princely sum at that moment — and would double his contribution as Rivera’s vision and the scale of the project expanded (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Edsel also played an unheralded role in support of the museum through the economic traumas to come.
A discussion of Rivera’s mural commission gets a bit ahead of our story, so let’s first look at Detroit’s explosive economic growth in the early years of the 20th century. This industrial transformation would provide the subject and the inspiration for Rivera’s frescoes.
The Motor City and the Great Depression
At the turn of the 20th century, Detroit “was a quiet, tree-shaded city, unobtrusively going about its business of brewing beer and making carriages and stoves” (WPA, 1941:231). Approaching 300,000 residents, Detroit was the 13th-largest city in the country (Martelle, 2012:71). A future of steady growth and easy prosperity seemed to beckon.
Instead, Henry Ford soon upended not only the city, but much of the world. He was hardly alone as an auto magnate in the area: Durant, Olds, the Fisher Brothers, and the Dodge Brothers, among others, were also in or around Detroit. Ford, however, would go beyond simply building a successful car company: he unleashed explosive growth in the auto industry, put the world on wheels, and became a global folk hero to many, yet some were more critical. The historian Joshua Freeman points out that “Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F. — the years “Anno Ford,” measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced — with Henry Ford the deity” (Freeman, 2018:147).
Ford combined three simple ideas and pursued them with razor-sharp, at times ruthless, intensity: the Model T, an affordable car for the masses; a moving assembly line that would jump-start productivity growth; and the $5 day for workers, double the prevailing wage in the industry. This combination of mass production and mass consumption — Fordism — allowed workers to buy the products they produced and laid the basis for a new manufacturing era. The automobile age was born.
The $5 day wasn’t altruism for Ford. The unrelenting pace and control of the assembly line was intense — often unbearable — even for workers who had grown up with back-breaking work: tilling the farm, mining coal, or tending machines in a factory. Annual turnover approached 400 percent at Ford’s Highland Park plant, and daily absenteeism was high. In response, Ford introduced the unprecedented new wage on January 12, 1914 (Martelle, 2012:74).
The press and his competitors denounced Ford — claiming this reckless move would bankrupt the industry — but the day the new rate began, 10,000 men arrived at the plant in the winter darkness before dawn. Despite the bitter cold, Ford security men aimed fire hoses to disperse the crowd. Covered in freezing water, the men nonetheless surged forward hoping to grasp an elusive better future for themselves and their families.
Here is where I enter the picture, so to speak. One of the relatively few who did get a job that chaotic day was Philip Chapman. He was a recent immigrant from Russia who had married a seamstress from Poland named Sophie, a spirited, beautiful young woman. They had met in the United States. He wound up working at Ford for 33 years — 22 of them at the Rouge plant — on the line and on machines. They were my grandparents.
By 1929, Detroit was the industrial capital of the world. It had jumped its place in line, becoming the fourth-largest city in the United States — trailing only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — with 1.6 million people (Martelle, 2012:71). “Detroit needed young men and the young men came,” the WPA Michigan guidebook writers pointed out, and they emphasized the kaleidoscopic diversity of those who arrived: “More Poles than in the European city of Poznan, more Ukrainians than in the third city of the Ukraine, 75,000 Jews, 120,000 Negroes, 126,000 Germans, more Bulgarians, [Yugoslavians], and Maltese than anywhere else in the United States, and substantial numbers of Italians, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, Syrians, English, Scotch, Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans” (WPA, 1941:231). Detroit was third nationally in terms of the foreign-born, and the African American population had soared from 6,000 in 1910 to 120,000 in 1930 (WPA, 1941:108), part of a journey that would ultimately involve more than six million people moving from the segregated, more rural South to the industrial cities of the North (Trotter, 2019:78).
DIA planners projected that Detroit would become the second-largest U.S. city by 1935 and that it could surpass New York by the early 1950s. “Detroit grew as mining towns grow — fast, impulsive, and indifferent to the superficial niceties of life,” the Michigan Guidebook writers concluded (WPA, 1941:231).
The highway ahead seemed endless and bright. The city throbbed with industrial production, the streetcars and buses were filled with workers going to and from work at all hours, and the noise of stamping presses and forges could be heard through open windows in the hot summers. Cafes served dinner at 11 p.m. for workers getting off the afternoon shift and breakfast at 5 a.m. for those arriving for the day shift. Despite prohibition, you could get a drink just about any time. After all, only a river separated Detroit from Canada, where liquor was still legal.
Rivera’s biographer and friend Bertram Wolfe wrote of “the tempo, the streets, the noise, the movement, the labor, the dynamism, throbbing, crashing life of modern America” (Wolfe, as cited in Rosenthal, 2015:65). The writers of the Michigan guidebook had a more down-to-earth view: “‘Doing the night spots’ consists mainly of making the rounds of beer gardens, burlesque shows, and all-night movie houses,” which tended to show rotating triple bills (WPA, 1941:232).
Henry Ford began constructing the colossal Rouge complex in 1917, which would employ more than 100,000 workers and spread over 1,000 acres by 1929. “It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor,” Joshua Freeman observed (Freeman, 2018:144). The historian Lindy Biggs accurately described the complex as “more like an industrial city than a factory” (Biggs, as cited in Freeman, 2018:144).
The Rouge was a marvel of vertical integration, making much of the car on site. Giant Ford-owned freighters would transport iron ore and limestone from Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula down through the Great Lakes, along the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, and then across the Rouge River to the docks of the plant. Seemingly endless trains would bring coal from West Virginia and Ohio to the plant. Coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open hearths produced iron and steel; rolling mills converted the steel ingots into long, thin sheets for body parts; foundries molded iron into engine blocks that were then precision machined; enormous stamping presses formed sheets of steel into fenders, hoods, and doors; and thousands of other parts were machined, extruded, forged, and assembled. Finished cars drove off the assembly line a little more than a day after the raw materials had arrived at the docks.
In 1928, Vanity Fair heralded the Rouge as “the most significant public monument in America, throwing its shadow across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty.... In a landscape where size, quantity, and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca, toward which the pious journey for prayer” (Jacob, as cited in Lichtenstein, 1995:13). My grandfather, I suspect, had a more prosaic goal: he needed a job, and Ford paid well.
Despite tough conditions in the plant, workers were proud to work at “Ford’s,” as people in Detroit tended to refer to the company. They wore their Ford badge on their shirts in the streetcars on the way to work or on their suits in church on Sundays. It meant something to have a job there. Once through the factory gate, however, the work was intense and often dangerous and unhealthy. Ford himself described repetitive factory work as “a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind,” yet he was firmly convinced strict control and tough discipline over the average worker was necessary to get anything done (Ford, as cited in Martelle, 2012:73). He combined the regimentation of the assembly line with increasingly autocratic management, strictly and often harshly enforced. You couldn’t talk on the line in Ford plants — you were paid to work, not talk — so men developed the “Ford whisper” holding their heads down and barely moving their lips. The Rouge employed 1,500 Ford “Service Men,” many of them ex-convicts and thugs, to enforce discipline and police the plant.
At a time when economic progress seemed as if it would go on forever, the U.S. stock market drove over a cliff in October 1929, and paralysis soon spread throughout the economy. Few places were as shaken as Detroit. In 1929, 5.5 million vehicles were produced, but just 1.4 million rolled off Detroit’s assembly lines three years later in 1932 (Martelle, 2012:114). The Michigan jobless rate hit 40 percent that year, and one out of three Detroit families lacked any financial support (Lichtenstein, 1995). Ford laid off tens of thousands of workers at the Rouge. No one knew how deep the downturn might go or how long it would last. What increasingly desperate people did know is that they had to feed their family that night, but they no longer knew how.
On March 7, 1932 — a bone-chilling day with a lacerating wind — 3,000 desperate, unemployed autoworkers met near the Rouge plant to march peaceably to the Ford Employment Office. Detroit police escorted the marchers to the Dearborn city line, where they were confronted by Dearborn Police and armed Ford Service Men. When the marchers refused to disperse, the Dearborn police fired tear gas, and some demonstrators responded with rocks and frozen mud. The marchers were then soaked with water from fire hoses and shot with bullets. Five workers were killed, 19 wounded by gunfire, and dozens more injured. Communists had organized the march, but a Michigan historical marker makes the following observation: “Newspapers alleged the marchers were communists, but they were in fact people of all political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.” That marker now hangs outside the United Auto Workers Local 600 union hall, which represents workers today at the Rouge plant.
Five days later, on March 12, thousands of people marched in downtown Detroit to commemorate the demonstrators who had been killed. Although Rivera was still in New York, he was aware of the Ford Hunger March before it took place and told Clifford Wight, his assistant, that he was eager “not [to] miss…[it] on any account” (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Both he and Kahlo had marched with workers in Mexico and embraced their causes. Rivera had captured their lives as well as their protests in his murals in Mexico.
As it turned out, they missed both the march and the commemoration. Instead, the following month Kahlo and Rivera’s train pulled into the Michigan Central Depot, where Wilhelm Valentiner met them. They were taken to the Ford-owned Wardell Hotel next to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA was the anchor of a grass-lined and tree-shaded cultural center several miles north of downtown. The Ford Highland Park Plant, where the automobile age began with the Model T and the moving assembly line, was four miles further north on the same street. Less than a mile northwest was the massive 15-story General Motors Building, the largest office building in the United States when it was completed in 1922, designed by the noted industrial architect Albert Khan, who also created the Rouge. Huge auto production complexes such as Dodge Main or Cadillac Motor — where I would serve my apprenticeship decades later — were not far away.
Valentiner had written Rivera stating, “The Arts Commission would be pleased if you could find something out of the history of Detroit, or some motif suggesting the development of industry in this town. But in the end, they decided to leave it entirely to you” (Beal, 2010:35). Beal points out “that what Valentiner had in mind at the time may have been something like the Helen Moody Wills paintings, something that had an allegorical slant to it. They were to get something completely different” (Beal, 2010:35). Edsel Ford emphasized he wanted Rivera to look at other industries in Detroit, such as pharmaceuticals, and provided a car and driver for Rivera and Kahlo to see the plants and the city.
But when Rivera visited the Rouge plant, he was mesmerized. He saw the future here, despite the fact that the plant had been hard hit by the Depression: the complex had been shuttered for the last six months of 1931, and thousands of workers had been let go before he arrived (Rosenthal, 2015:67). His fascination with machinery, his respect for workers, and his politics fused in an extraordinary artistic vision, which he filled with breathtaking technical detail. He had found his muse.
Rivera took on the seemingly impossible task of capturing the sprawling Rouge plant in frescoes. The initial commission of two large-format frescoes rapidly expanded to 27 frescoes of various sizes filling the entire room from floor to ceiling. Rivera spent the next two months at the manufacturing complex drawing, pacing, photographing, viewing, and translating these images into large drawings — “cartoons” — as the plans for the frescoes. He demonstrated an exceptional ability to retain in his head — and, I suspect, in his dreams — what he would paint.
Rivera’s Vast Masterpieces
Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals are anchored in a specific time and place — a sprawling iconic factory, the Depression decade, and the Motor City — yet they achieve the universal in a way that transcends their origins. Rivera painted workers toiling on assembly lines amid blast furnaces pouring molten iron into cupolas, and through the alchemy of his genius, the art still powerfully — even urgently — speaks to us today. The murals celebrate the contribution of workers, the power of industry, and the promise and peril of science and technology. Rivera weaves together Aztec myths, indigenous world views, Mexican culture, and U.S. industry in a visual tour-de-force that delights, challenges, and provokes. The art is both accessible and profound. You can enjoy it for an afternoon or intensely study it for a lifetime with a sense of constant discovery.
Roberta Smith points out that the murals “form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting” (Smith, 2015). Over time, the frescoes have emerged as a visible and vital part of the city, becoming part of Detroit’s DNA. Rivera’s art has been both witness to and, more recently, a participant in history. When he began the project in late spring 1932, Detroit was tottering at the edge of insolvency, and 80 years later, the murals witnessed the city skidding into the largest municipal bankruptcy in history in 2013. A deep appreciation for the murals and their close identification with the spirit and hope of Detroit may have contributed to saving the museum this second time around.
I still vividly remember my own reaction when I first saw the murals. As a young boy, the Rouge, the auto industry, and Detroit seemed to course through our lives. My grandfather Philip Chapman, who was hired at Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1914, wound up spending most of his working life on the line at the Rouge. As a young boy, I watched my grandmother Sophie pack his lunch and fill his thermos with hot coffee before dawn as he hurried to catch the first of three buses that would take him to the plant. When my father, Max, came to Detroit three decades later in the mid-1940s to marry my mother, Rose — they had met on a subway while she was visiting New York City, where he lived — he worked on the line at a Chrysler plant on Jefferson Avenue.
One weekend, when I was 10 or 11 years old, my father took me to see the murals. He drove our 1950 Ford down Woodward Avenue, a broad avenue that bisected the city from the Detroit River to its northern border at Eight Mile Road. Woodward seemed like the main street of the world at the time; large department stores — Hudson’s was second only to Macy’s in size and splendor — restaurants, movie theaters, and office buildings lined both sides of the street north from the river. Detroit had the highest per capita income in the country, a palpable economic power seen in the scale of the factories and the seemingly endless numbers of trucks rumbling across the city to transport parts between factories and finished vehicles to dealers.
We walked up terraced white steps to the main entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts, an imposing Beaux-Arts building constructed with Vermont marble in what had become the city’s cultural center. As we entered the building, the sounds of the city disappeared. We strolled the gleaming marble floors of the Great Hall, a long gallery topped far above by a beautiful curved ceiling with light flowing through large windows. Imposing suits of medieval armor stood guard in glass cases on either side of us as we crossed the Hall, passed under an arch, and entered a majestic courtyard.
We found ourselves in what is now called the Rivera Court, surrounded on all sides by the “Detroit Industry” murals. The impact was startling. We weren’t simply observing the frescoes, we were enveloped by them. It was a moment of wonder as we looked around at what Rivera had created. Linda Downs captured the feeling: “Rivera Court has become the sanctuary of the Detroit Institute of Arts, a ‘sacred’ place dedicated to images of workers and technology” (Downs, 1999:65). I couldn’t have articulated this sentiment then, but I certainly felt it.
The size, scale, form, pulsing activity, and brilliant color of the paintings deeply impressed me. I saw for the first time where my grandfather went every morning before dawn and why he looked so drawn every night when he came home just before dinner. Many years later, I began to appreciate the art in a much deeper way, but the thrill of walking into the Rivera Court on that first visit has never left. I came to realize that an indelible dimension of great art is a sense of constant discovery and rediscovery. The murals captured the spirit of Detroit then and provide relevance and insight for the times we live in today.
Beal points out that Rivera “worked in a heroic, realist style that was easily graspable” (Beal, 2010:35). A casual viewer, whether a schoolboy or an autoworker from Detroit or a tourist from France, can enjoy the art, yet there is no limit to engaging the frescoes on many deeper levels. In contrast, “throughout Western history, visual art has often been the domain of the educated or moneyed elite,” Jillian Steinhauer wrote in the New York Times. “Even when artists like Gustave Courbet broke new ground by depicting working-class people, the art itself still wasn’t meant for them” (Steinhauer, 2019). Rivera upended this paradigm and sought to paint public art for workers as well as elites on the walls of public buildings. By putting these murals at the center of a great museum in the 1930s through the efforts of Wilhelm Valentiner and Edsel Ford — and more recently, under Graham Beal and the current director Salvador Salort-Pons — the Detroit Institute of Arts opened itself and the murals to new Detroit populations. Detroit is now 80-percent African American, the metropolitan area has the highest number of Arab Americans in the United States, and the Latino population is much larger than when Rivera painted, yet the murals retain their allure and meaning for new generations.
Upon entering the Rivera Court, the viewer confronts two monumental murals facing each other on the north and south walls. The murals not only define the courtyard, they draw you into the engine and assembly lines deep inside the Rouge. The factory explodes with cacophonous activity. The production process is a throbbing, interconnected set of industrial activities. Intense heat, giant machines, flaming metal, light, darkness, and constant movement all converge. Undulating steel rail conveyors carry parts overhead. There were 120 miles of conveyors in the Rouge at the time; they linked all aspects of production and provide a thematic unity to the mural. And even though he’s portraying a production process in Detroit, Rivera’s deep appreciation of Mexican culture and heritage infuses the frescoes. An Aztec cosmology of the underworld and the heavens runs in long panels spanning the top of the main murals and similar imagery appears throughout the frescoes.
On the north wall, a tightly packed engine assembly line, with workers laboring on both sides, is flanked by two huge machine tools — 20 feet or so high — machining the famed Ford V8 engine blocks. Workers in the foreground strain to move heavy cast-iron engine blocks; muscles bulge, bodies tilt, shoulders pull in disciplined movement. These workers are not anonymous. At the center foreground of the north wall, with his head almost touching a giant spindle machine, is Paul Boatin, an assistant to Rivera who spent his working life at the Rouge. He would go on to become a United Auto Workers (UAW) organizer and union leader. Boatin had been present at the Ford Hunger March on that disastrous day in March 1932 and still choked up talking about it many decades later in an interview in the film The Great Depression (1990).
In the foreground, leaning back and pulling an engine block with a white fedora on his head may have been Antonio Martínez, an immigrant from Mexico and the grandfather of Louis Aguilar. A reporter for the Detroit News, Aguilar describes how fierce, at times ugly, pressures during the Great Depression forced many Mexicans to leave Detroit and return to their homeland. The city’s Mexican population plummeted from 15,000 at the beginning of the 1930s to 2,000 at the end of the decade. If the figure in the mural is not his grandfather, Aguilar writes “let every Latino who had family in Detroit around 1932 and 1933 declare him as their own” (Aguilar, 2018).
A giant blast furnace spewing molten metal reigns above the engine production, which bears a striking resemblance to a Charles Sheeler photo of one of the five Rouge blast furnaces. The flames are so intense, and the men so red, you can almost feel the heat. In fact, the process is truly volcanic and symbolic of the turbulent terrain of Mexico itself. It brings to mind Popocatépetl, the still-active 18,000-foot volcano rising to the skies near Mexico City. To the left, above the engine block line, green-tinted workers labor in a foundry, one of the dirtiest, most unhealthy, most dangerous jobs. Meanwhile, a tour group observes the process. Among them in a black bowler hat is Diego Rivera himself.
On the south wall, workers toil on the final assembly line just before the critical “body drop,” where the body of a Model B Ford is lowered to be bolted quickly to the car frame on a moving assembly line below. Once again, through his perspective Rivera draws you into the line. A huge stamping press to the right forms fenders from sheets of steel like those produced in the Rouge facilities. Unlike most of the other machines Rivera portrays, which are state of the art, this press is an older model, selected because of its stylized resemblance to an ancient sculpture of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of life and death (Beale, 2010:41; Downs, 1999:140, 144).
On the left is another larger tour group, which includes a priest and Dick Tracy, a classic cartoon character of the era. The Katzenjammer Kids — more comic icons of the time — are leaning on the wall watching the assembly line move. The eyes of most of the visitors seem closed, as if they were physically present, but not seeing the intense, occasionally brutal, activity before them. Rivera, in effect, is giving us a few winks and a nod with cartoon characters and unobservant tourists.
~
Harley Shaiken · Fall 2019.
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Are Gene Edited Cows or Humans What We Really Need?
Scientists using the “second generation” of genetic manipulation technology have used gene-editing to alter the DNA of breed of cattle so that they supposedly do not grow horns. At around the same time another group of scientists claim to have injected human cells into monkeys to create chimeras, as in the ancient Greek myths of beings part lion, part snake. Earlier this year a group of Chinese researchers claimed to have deliberately gene-edited monkey clones with a mental disturbance. What few realize is that all this is taking place almost entirely without any serious health and safety regulation. Is this what mankind really needs at this juncture?
Gene-edited hornless cows
Scientists at the biotech company Recombinetics have filed a patent on cattle it has genetically engineered to not grow horns using gene-editing methods. They claimed the process to be safe and effective. However tests by scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration revealed that the CRISPR gene-editing process resulted in “unexpected alterations” of the genome, including “complex genomic rearrangements at or near the target site in 34 mammalian genome editing experiments.”
The FDA researchers found gene-editing errors in the genome of the animals that were being overlooked. They identified major unintended effects. The gene scissors used, known as TALENs, are often described as highly precise. However, the FDA research showed that apart from the desired gene sequences being inserted into the genome, DNA originating from genetically engineered bacteria used in the process was also inserted. Specifically, they found presence of unintended antibiotic resistance genes in the gene-edited cattle. Recombinetics reports that it is also developing a precision gene-editing breeding method to eliminate the need to castrate pigs. Unintended effects?
Human Monkey Brain?
In another recent application of the gene-editing technology, an international group of scientists working in China have used gene-editing to produce human-monkey chimeras. According to the Spanish paper, El Pais, a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the USA have produced monkey-human chimeras. The report says that the research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues.” That should give pause.
Belmonte’s team states that the research is aimed at solving the problem of lack of organ donors as well as organ transplant rejection. Belmonte apparently has managed to produce both pig embryos and sheep embryos which contain human cells. They took cells from an adult human and reprogrammed them to become stem cells, which can give rise to any type of cell in the body. They are then introduced into the embryo of another species, such as the monkey or sheep or pigs.
Commenting on the implications of using gene-editing to produce human-animal chimeras, Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist from London’s Francis Crick Institute admits potential problems: “How do you restrict the contribution of the human cells just to the organ that you want to make?” he said. “If that is a pancreas or a heart or something, or kidney, then that is fine, if you manage to do that. [But] if you allow these animals to go all the way through and be born, if you have a big contribution to the central nervous system from the human cells, then that obviously becomes a concern.”
Other controversial China CRISPR gene-editing experiments have involved adding human brain genes, MCPH1, or microcephalin to monkeys. The gene-editing scientist, Bing Su, claimed, based on very small test results, that the monkeys seemed to be “smarter.” Bing Su and collaborators at the Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research exposed monkey embryos to a virus carrying the human version of microcephalin. They generated 11 monkeys, five of which survived to take part in a battery of brain measurements. The monkeys each have between two and nine copies of the human gene in their bodies. University of Colorado geneticist, James Sikela is critical: “The use of transgenic monkeys to study human genes linked to brain evolution is a very risky road to take.”
These are only several of the more alarming recent experiments using gene-editing CRISPR. The significant problem is that there is no scientific neutral oversight as to what experiments are being done. Because CRISPR requires very little relative investment in technology, it can be widely used even by irresponsible experimenters.
CRISPR Dangers
CRISPR is defined as a “RNA-guided gene-editing platform that makes use of a bacterially-derived protein (Cas9) and a synthetic guide RNA to introduce a double strand break at a specific location within the genome.” The widespread experimenting with CRISPR-CAs9, the currently most widely used, has only been around since about 2015. Geneticists back in the 1970’s were restricted to costly labs using highly trained scientists and strict controls. With CRISPR gene editing, the process is extraordinarily cheap and seemingly easy to use. As one critic described it, “anyone can buy some CAS9 for a few hundred bucks, any halfway decent lab can use it to alter the DNA of anything…We might be able to wipe out entire species on a whim…”
Potentially CRISPR gene-editing technology might enable positive change as well, such as treatments for genetic diseases; altering the germline of humans, animals, and other organisms; and modifying the genes of food crops for positive traits. We don’t know at this point. Yet the degree of unbiased scientific and government oversight over use of CRISPR is appalling.
Lack of Regulatory Oversight
In 2018 European Court of Justice ruled that organisms that arise from a new technique called directed mutagenesis (gene-editing) are GMOs as defined by the EU GMO Directive. As such they should be regulated in the same strict way as GMOs produced in the EU using older techniques. The ruling was greeted as a sane, rational step to insure the health and safety of people and the planet is priority.
The interests backing CRISPR and other gene-editing, were not pleased. However, immediately the ECJ ruling was attacked as a departure from “science based decision making” and “backward looking and hostile to progress,” even though the judges carefully consulted a variety of expert scientists. The powerful GMO industry lobby has organized an effort to have the new EU Commission create “a new legal regulatory framework for these new techniques,” one that is far less restrictive we can be sure.
In the US where Monsanto and the GMO industry has succeeded in creating effectively no government regulation of GMO plants such as corn or soybeans or cotton, the biotech industry has been more successful. The USDA recently proposed excluding the new gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR from in effect any regulation. This ignores the purpose of such regulation which is to hold the health and safety of the individual and of the environment paramount to any potential marketing gains from easy regulation. It is the well-established Precautionary Principle. That principle holds that government has a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. The onus of proof is on the GMO industry not the public. Just because they call their work “biotech” does not axiomatically mean that it is good for us. That we must carefully evaluate, most especially in a field such as gene-editing with the potential to “wipe out entire species on a whim …”
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Britain’s Warfare State
Published: OpenDemocracy (24 September 2018) w/ Mark Curtis
In September 2017, London hosted the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) arms fair, the biggest in the world. Delegations of military officials and politicians from across the globe descended on the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands to play pick ‘n mix with the world’s most deadly technology.
We were granted a press pass to the DSEI the day before it opened, despite applying several months earlier and repeatedly checking up. The pass came through only after we threatened to publicise the case. The opaque arms industry and the governments that support it do not like journalists or civil society dampening the buying mood.
Docklands, London
Once inside we saw delegations from nearly every oppressive state in the world walking the air-conditioned halls. At the flagship BAE exhibition, we took a few photos of the Egyptian delegation talking to a stocky BAE official. All the Egyptian military men had obscured their identity badges, but they could not stop us taking photos.
In the middle of this, what looked like a British military official, moustachioed and in full officer garb, told us to stop, that we weren’t allowed to take photos. We protested that we had never heard that. He said it didn’t matter. We asked him whom he worked for. “The Defence and Security Organisation,” he replied. We saw that there were other officials with the DSO badge on their breast. Who were they? Why were they working for BAE Systems?
The Defence Sales Organisation (DSO) – the predecessor to the current Defence and Security Organisation – was set up in 1966 under Harold Wilson’s Labour government and was part of a significant reform of the Ministry of Defence. There was no great fanfare about its advent but the internal reasoning was that Britain had effectively lost its Empire and was looking for ways to retain “clout” on the international stage. Becoming a major arms dealer was one of the ways to do that.
As the Cold War raged, the UK was also losing business to its rivals. The UK share of the world aircraft market fell more than half in the five years to 1964 to just 14%. In this context, a report commissioned by Defence Secretary Dennis Healey recommended the creation of “a small but very high powered central arms sales organisation in the MoD”.
It also recommended that the DSO be headed by an arms industry executive, and this has been the case ever since. Essentially the DSO joins arms industry executives and government trade officials in a concerted effort to sell British weapons of war around the world.
Despite its controversial position in the UK’s export ecosystem, in 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was scrapping the DSO as part of the MOD. The decision was apparently made without the knowledge of BAE - a rare thing in the industry. Gerald Howarth, a shadow defence minister, said at the time: "This is outrageous. DESO [as it was then called] has been responsible for £5bn of British defence exports." But, as Robin Cook said in his memoirs, "I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10.” He added, "Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE."
True to this maxim, the body was salvaged and repurposed as part of the Department for International Trade.
Impartial advice
Nowadays DSO is very visible at arms shows, helping visiting buyers and delegations understand the latest technology offered by BAE Systems and its smaller competitors. It says it offers exporters free support by “company visits ... to [headquarters] in Salisbury to discuss how [we] ... can support you in export opportunities and campaigns,” alongside “impartial military advice ... on products and capabilities to enhance and exploit opportunities in overseas defence and security markets”.
The DSO has around 105 staff in London and another 27 members in its export support team. It also has 20 diplomatic posts overseas with the title ‘First Secretary, Defence and Security’.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, we gleaned information on where DSO has people stationed throughout the world. It said it had 57 officials, including three people in Japan, Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Turkey, and the largest number, four, in the US. The UK taxpayer pays for three fulltime staff in Mexico City to sell British weapons to a country ravaged by violence. The UK has exported small weapons ammunition, weapon sights and components for rifles, among other things, to the Mexican military.
Half of the private sector individuals seconded to the DIT have “strong links” to the arms industry. But the government’s help to the arms industry doesn’t end there. When buyers cannot afford British weapons, the government subsidises loans to them through export credit guarantees. UK Export Finance, which is supposed to back all British exports, says 50% of the support it provides (in the form of loans or guarantees) is given to military exports.
The British state is set up to deal arms, and its mission has been successful.
Thatcher and the arms industry
Britain is a country of 65 million people, and the 21st most populous nation in the world, with the 9th largest economy in the world based on GDP (PPP). But this small island, with very little in the way of an industrial base, has become the second largest exporter of arms in the world. Britain is the go-to country for despots around the world who want to ‘tool up’.
Aside from the establishment of the DSO, the key to this is a little-known element of the Thatcher Revolution in the 1980s. The story of Thatcher’s confrontation with the unions and the industries they represented is well known. Thatcher's government emerged victorious and replaced a manufacturing base with the “Big Bang” in the City of London, which drew capital looking for a liberal regulatory environment from around the world. London and the country as a whole is still living with the consequences of this revolution.
But Thatcher wasn’t a total industrial arsonist. There was one industry that she promoted to unprecedented levels: the arms industry. During her tenure, the British economy was given a massive boost from the sale of military hardware, and Thatcher spent a large portion of her overseas trips trying to sell British arms to foreign governments.
In 1985, for instance, Thatcher negotiated what is still the largest ever British arms deal. The Al-Yamamah agreement would see Britain sell fighter jets, missiles and ships to Saudi Arabia worth £42bn. The deal was, though, riven with accusations of corruption and bribery, the extent of which may be never fully known: two National Audit Office reports on the Al-Yamamah have been suppressed because of “national interest” concerns. Mark Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s son, also stands accused of making millions of pounds in “commissions” from the sales.
The deal led to Britain pushing ahead of France and Russia as an exporter of arms, behind only the US. Over the past 10 years, the UK has sold over £122 billion worth of arms around the world, 20 per cent of the global total. Thatcher would regard this as an industrial success story.
Since the Thatcher era, however, warfare has changed markedly. Technology has changed how wars are fought, while many adversaries have splintered and become uncoupled from states. But Britain has maintained its pre-eminence in the industry, nimbly moving on to dominate the cyber sector and private military sector in turn, thanks both to the relationships and capacities offered by the conventional arms industry and to the light-touch regulatory environment fostered during the Thatcher era. No subsequent government since she stepped down as Prime Minister in 1990 has wanted to restrict Britain’s industries of war and repression from having maximum power on the world stage.
Cyber warfare and mercenaries
But the arms industry and the government’s willingness to champion it has also enabled the UK to become a global hub for companies working on the cutting edge of the new cyber warfare. According to Privacy International, the UK has 104 surveillance companies producing technology for export – to foreign governments and corporations – headquartered in the country. That number is more than double the number of companies of the next European country, France, which has 45 companies headquartered in country.
Privacy International, the NGO working on privacy rights, has written: “The UK government … promotes exports abroad through the UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Organisation, for example, proactively assisting surveillance company Hidden Technologies to access markets abroad by providing advice and introducing the company to potential customers.”
The UK has significantly more surveillance technology companies registered in its borders than anywhere in the world outside the US. This technology is being exported, with government approval, to some of the most repressive regimes in the world.
The UK’s role in the US War on Terror since 2001 has given the war industries another fillip. Many of the private military and security companies (PMSCs) in the UK were set up by former soldiers in the British military who left service after fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and wanted to make significantly more money in mercenary work. As Dave Allison, chief executive and founder of Octaga, a Hereford-based PMSC, says: “I left the forces after serving time with the parachute regiment and the Special Forces. I saw a distinct gap in providing security to corporate and private clientele, the various big companies out there that were doing it, it was all basically being driven on price, and we wanted to offer them something a little bit different, something bespoke. We cater for various clientele, from television and film industry, to corporate, government, and private high net worth (HNT) individuals, so it’s really broad spectrum of services we do, we do the physical side, the consultation side, and we do the technical side.” He says business has been roaring since they set up in 2001.
But like the conventional arms industry, these companies are shrouded in secrecy, something the government has no interest in ending. A large reason for the attractiveness of the UK as a destination is that these companies – and those producing conventional arms and surveillance technology – are left alone by government and the media. Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer in International Relations at Westminster University and author of a report on PMSCs in the UK, says that “this is a world where very little is known about what’s going on, no-one is publishing data on this. The government is not publishing lists of PMSCs which are operating, PMSCs themselves if you look on their websites… it (is) just corporate rubbish.”
This combination of learned skills in warfare, liberal regulation, the lucrativeness of mercenary work, and Britain’s global-facing heritage has meant that, today, the UK is the world’s leading centre for PMCS. According to the SiéChéou-Kang Center at the University of Denver, the UK has by far the largest number of PMSCs headquartered in country (199 companies).
So this is twenty-first century Britain. Surveillance system producers, mercenary groups, arms industries are flourishing in the dark. As well as being the financial capital of the world, the UK is right at the centre of the world’s war industry. The latter crown is more embarrassing, so we don’t hear about it, but it has been steadily fostered by successive governments for seventy years.
Livelihoods
Ground zero for the British arms industry – and all the issues it raises in the country -– is Barrow-in-Furness.
While there, we met Norman Hill who has been agitating against nuclear weapons for nearly half a century but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm one bit. As we walk along the empty road that runs alongside BAE Systems’ imposing shipyard at the edge of Barrow, the veteran anti-nuclear activist speaks at a hundred miles an hour, wanting to get all the arguments against the industry that sustains his town out as fast as possible.
Hill was born in the town in 1941 and has lived most of his life in the town. “I came from a solid working class family. My dad was an engineer in the shipyard,” he tells us. The Barrow shipyard occupies a central place in the production of what is called Britain’s ‘nuclear deterrent’, producing the submarines which carry the missiles and nuclear warheads.
The previous class of nuclear submarines was produced here, as will be the new submarines that will carry Trident. Hill first became involved in the anti-nuclear movement in Barrow in the mid 1970s. There was talk of cruise missiles being deployed in the UK in response to a Soviet build-up the US claimed was a threat to Europe. He thought the idea was madness. Hill’s father worked in the shipyard, but was supportive of his son’s activism. “At that time there were a lot of people in the shipyard who agreed with that position,” he says. Much has changed since then.
“The nest of the dragon is here, pure evil,” he says, pointing towards the shipyard. “The fact that people are dependent on living for manufacturing this obscenity. The submarines themselves are not an obscenity; it’s what they are going to carry. That’s the obscenity.”
The current Trident renewal proposal aims to replace four Vanguard class nuclear submarines with four new submarines of the so-called Dreadnought class. They will have a 30-year life cycle. Each one costs over £8bn. Government policy is to have an ‘active stockpile’ of 160 nuclear weapons, 40 nuclear warheads on each submarine, with up to eight missiles, each of which is longer than Nelson’s Column. They are hydrogen bombs - weapons that have never been dropped outside of tests and have 100 kilotonnes of explosive power, about seven times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “We could have 160 of those,” said Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), an organisation of scientists and engineers concerned about the misuse of science and technology in the UK. “You could literally destroy civilisation with that, basically.”
Crossing the bridge over the Devonshire Dock where the shipyard sits, we see one of the nuclear submarines poking out from under the water. It is hard to fathom that little Barrow, population 69,087, is the central node in the production of a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out civilisation. “No one really thinks about it like this,” Hill tells us as we take in the scene.
Barrow, the biggest town in Cumbria, sits on the outer edge of the Furness peninsula which juts into to the Irish Sea. Half an hour drive north takes you into the tourist hotspot of the Lake District, but Barrow is a world away from there. The shipyard has dominated the town since its inception in the 1870s. 70 miles up the coast is Sellafield, where nuclear waste disposal is a divisive political issue.
The nuclear warheads are produced and maintained at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston, a town of just over a thousand people near Reading. The site was the end point for anti-nuclear weapons demonstrators who did an annual walk from London in the 1950s and 1960s. The government owns the site, but private sector contractors operate it. The AWE is run by a consortium of three companies (two of them American) – Lockheed Martin, Serco and Jacobs Engineering. The missiles are made in the US and then rented to the UK. Britain does not own the missiles on which its nuclear warheads sit. Nonetheless, it is considered an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’, though it is arguable that only one of the words in the phrase – nuclear – is true.
Barrow shipyard
The Barrow shipyard became part of BAE when Marconi Electronic Systems and British Aerospace merged in 1999. The company dominates the town physically: the shipyard is the first thing you see as you come into the town, eclipsing the rows of one up, one down terraces that line the roads. The company’s logo is all over the town. On one of the main streets in the centre we come across a slab of pavement with BAE’s logo spray-painted on Banksy-style. Up the pedestrianised Dalton Street, which runs to the shipyard from the centre of town, sits a brass monument (paid for by BAE Systems) of workers in heroic poses. ‘LABOUR. WIDE AS THE EARTH’ says one engraving. ‘COURAGE. THE READINESS IS ALL’ reads another.
BAE has essential leverage over every aspect of Barrow because of the jobs the shipyard provides. If anyone proposes something the company doesn’t like, it can say it will shut down the shipyard. But they do not like visitors. After nearly a year of back and forth, BAE Systems refused us a tour of the shipyard or an interview. Meanwhile Unite and GMB unions, both representing workers in the shipyard, said they could not provide any workers or shop stewards to be interviewed. The secrecy of the arms industry is one its most striking features: the companies and these workers are employed on government contracts, paid for by the public. Unite and GMB were big supporters of Corbyn’s leadership bid while being in favour of Trident renewal to save jobs.
In the Furness Railway, a buzzing Wetherspoons pub a stone’s throw from the Labour party’s headquarters in the town, locals eat and drink from early in the morning to late in the night. It’s a regular hangout for young lads who work at the shipyard. We sit down with two who are getting in their evening beers. Jack Burns is a 31 year old steelworker at the shipyard, a place it was always his dream to work in. “I always wanted to work in there but I’ve only been working there for the last year. I’ve had a career in office work and computer work but I like to work with my hands plus my grandparents always worked in the yard. In fact, my great granddad died on one of the boats when he worked in there, before - was born.” Everyone in Barrow has a multi-generational connection of some sort to the shipyard.
Jeremy Corbyn
Has he been worried about Corbyn’s position on Trident renewal? “I don’t care too much about it to be honest with you. It’s just another contract. We just go in. We just do our job. You know? I mean, not many people ask about it and it doesn’t really come up.”
Barrow, a working class town built on manufacturing, is a natural Labour heartland. “But the Labour manifesto actually supported the renewal with Trident. It’s just Corbyn himself that didn’t support it. So, I don’t know. There is worry. I’m certainly worried because I’m only a year deep in my work. I’d like to think that I’ve got a career for life.”
His friend, Josh Crawford, 18, and also a steelworker at the shipyard, chimes in, “Now they’ve passed the Dreadnought and I don’t think they’d get rid of it. But I think it could halt future buildings.”
Corbyn has promised to replace any jobs lost, in the event of not renewing Trident, with high skilled employment in other industries. Doesn’t that assuage their fears? “Actually, no,” says Jack. “If we get rid of the Trident renewal, then they’re not gonna give us any jobs. I think Barrow is only as well known as it is because of the shipyard. I think if you got rid of the shipyard, in Barrow a lot of people would move out. Barrow would become a deserted town. The only reason Barrow is a thriving town is because of the shipyard.”
The fear that promises of alternative employment might not be met is understandable. The Thatcher government made similar promises as it destroyed the mining industry, but never replaced the jobs, leaving subsequent generations deprived and destitute. But to many in the anti-nuclear community, Corbyn is valued because he believes in both nuclear disarmament and in protecting workers.
Jack continues: “I believe him when he says that he doesn’t support Trident, which is actually the missile system. It’s not the submarine. I remember hearing him say that. Just because he doesn’t support Trident doesn’t mean that the submarines can’t still be built. They still have other functions so there is that. I don’t fully understand if he was saying that just to keep some people happy. He doesn’t sort of strike us as the sort of person to keep people happy.”
We ask them if they would consider themselves Corbyn supporters. “I don’t really like the guy personally, but then I don’t necessarily like Theresa May either,” says Jack. “I’m leaning towards Theresa May, but I think that’s because of the fact that I want to keep my job.” Josh adds: “If I had to vote, I’d definitely vote for Theresa May. She wants to renew Trident.”
“So you’d vote on a single issue on this one?” we ask.
“When our job’s put in jeopardy, yes, because this is probably the best paying job I’ll ever have,” says Jack. “And I’ve got a five year old son to support, so if I ended up losing my job simply because Jeremy Corbyn didn’t like it, then that’s probably enough for me to not like him.”
This is the sentiment Hill is up against, and it’s pervasive and understandable.
The behemoth
British governments have long viewed the arms industry as a key mechanism to boost the British economy. Brexit looks set to be the next stage – after the creation of DSO under Labour and the Thatcherite Revolution – in the arms industry's occupation of the British state.
The government claims it has a rigorous export licensing system for its arms exports. Britain has had a defined export licensing process to approve arms sales since 1997, when recommendations in the Scott Report into arms sales to Saddam Hussein were enacted.
Arms companies require licences from the DTI to sell “goods, technology, software or components designed or modified for military use” as well as “‘dual use’ goods, technology, software, documents or diagrams which meet certain technical standards and could be used for military or civilian purposes”.
But the export licensing system is shrouded in secrecy, with information very difficult to get. In the case of an information request made to the government about surveillance technology sold to Egypt by the UK, further requests were declined because it would “likely prejudice the commercial interests of any companies that may have applied for a licence,” and “would reveal details of the markets that companies are operating in and possibly details of commercial opportunities that are still available.” With this proviso many information requests are turned down.
British arms export 'controls' seem more about facilitating exports than restricting them. The licensing system still allows half of all UK’s arms sales to go to the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, currently undertaking a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, using British-supplied warplanes and missiles. Since 2008, the UK has sold £10.8bn of weapons to the Saudis, by far the biggest market for UK companies. The British government has rejected repeated calls to halt arms sales to Riyadh.
In some conflicts, the government just does not know if its weapons are being used. Earlier this year, Turkish military forces intervened in the mainly Kurdish-controlled province of Afrin in northern Syria, in an operation widely criticised by human rights groups. In answer to a parliamentary question, the British government stated: “We cannot categorically state that UK weapons are not in use in Turkish military operations in Afrin”.
‘Responsible’ arms exports
Another major problem is that, as the government admits, “We do not collect data on the use of equipment after sale.” It is hard to see how this is consistent with government claims that it operates a 'responsible' arms export policy.
The same government department set up to promote and facilitate arms exports is meant to regulate them, too. Licences are provided by the Export Control Organisation (ECO), which is part of the DIT. And it shows.
Levels of sales of British arms to countries around the world often correlate with an uptick in violations of human rights norms in those countries. The majority of British arms go to the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring when authoritarian governments cracked down on protest movements and dissent, the British government did not blink. Arms continued to flow, in fact, in nearly all cases the increased demand was met by more British arms. Countries where repression has deepened in recent years, such as Egypt, Israel and Bahrain, remain significant recipients of British weapons and military equipment.
The problem is not just that British equipment might be used to crush legitimate dissent; it is that the supply of weapons to security forces sends an overall message of support for what they are doing. It can also enhance the international legitimacy of repressive states and reduce the political space for opposition forces to challenge them.
BAE Systems is the jewel in the crown of the British arms industry. Other significant companies in the country include Rolls Royce, Babcock, Serco, Cobham, QinetiQ, Meggitt, but BAE is in a class of its own. A large majority of UK arms procurement goes straight into the coffers of BAE. Through an FOI we submitted, we discovered that the UK consistently awards contracts worth over $3bn a year to BAE Systems - around 10% of its total outlay. BAE, actively involved in the Yemen war as a supplier of aircraft and technical military assistance to the Saudis, made profits of £792m in the first half of 2018.
BAE profits
BAE's profits are very important to the UK government, which is a key reason it maintains such a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, which has 6,000 BAE staffers in the country, according to the Labour MP, Graham Jones, who we met in Portcullis House. Jones was recently appointed chair of the Committee on Arms Export Controls in Parliament. In our hour-long meeting, he spent considerable time defending Saudi Arabia’s record in Yemen, and insisted there was no evidence British weapons had been used in atrocities. He said he had a very strong aversion to the reporting of NGOs on the situation in Yemen.
It is hard to know the extent of lobbying by BAE in the UK, but in the US things are more transparent. In trying to drum up business in the US, BAE has put a lot of money into its lobbying operation in Washington DC. According to records, Podesta Group, which is now under investigation in the Russia-Trump inquiry, received most money from BAE in 2017.
Through the FOI, we obtained recognition that it had been “established from the records ... that BAE Systems did once form a part of a business delegation that accompanied the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for International Trade on a visit to India in November 2016.” This was Theresa May’s first bilateral meeting since becoming Prime Minister. May said: “The UK and India are natural partners – the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy – and together I believe we can achieve great things – delivering jobs and skills, developing new technologies and improving our cities, tackling terrorism and climate change.” Securing contracts for BAE Systems was obviously a large part of this.
We also requested the FCO briefing notes for Theresa May's April 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia. After being kept waiting for eight months, we were told they came under a national security exemption. A lengthy discussion had obviously taken place inside the department.
There is a revolving door between the MOD and DTI and the arms industry. Through another FOI request, it was revealed that in one year, from 2006 to 2007, 36 former employees of the MOD applied to join BAE Systems. These employees use the knowledge gained from MOD to earn bigger sums in the private sector, and may end up back at DSO.
BAE is heavily involved in many centres of learning in the UK, making it indispensable to young engineers getting an education. The company has partnered with Cranfield University to boost Britain’s engineering skills through a new post-graduate engineering apprenticeship programme, which will provide learners with a valuable Masters-level qualification. Richard Hamer, director of education and skills at BAE Systems, said it was part of the company's "on going commitment to nurture talent and high-end skills.” Britain’s top universities have received at least £83m worth of funds during 2014-17 from firms involved in the arms trade.
Unions are also a very powerful lobby for the arms industry. By making the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and Britain’s nuclear submarines, BAE employs 34,600 people in the UK, out of 83,100 worldwide. Workers from BAE Systems recently travelled from across England to the Houses of Parliament to lobby MPs and demand that the government “takes back control of Britain’s defence capability and spends the UK’s defence budget to support jobs in Britain rather than in factories overseas”. The lobby was organised by Unite, the UK’s largest defence union, following plans by BAE Systems to cut nearly 2,000 jobs. The cuts, which will see significant job losses in Typhoon and Hawk aircraft production as well as RAF base support and at BAE’s marine division, came amid warnings that nearly 25 per cent of the UK’s military spending will benefit US factories and firms such as Boeing by 2020.
Is there an alternative?
Military industry in the UK is made up of close to 2,500 companies, generates £33.5bn in turnover and employs 128,000 people, according to the government.Yet even from this high base, the government is currently seeking, in effect, to further militarise the British economy and society. The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review was the first time the UK officially recognised promoting prosperity as a national security task. Ministers have said that "Strategic exports are now a core activity for the Ministry of Defence so we are calling on companies to play their part in increasing defence export sales and attracting inward investment into the UK".
The government's new Defence Industrial Strategy, announced last December, and its new Combat Air Strategy, announced earlier this year, both envisage deepening UK industry's reliance on the military sector for jobs and growth. Indeed, the government has recently come to a stunning but little-noticed conclusion about its industrial strategy, saying that "British prosperity relies on defence". A government-commissioned review of defence’s contribution to national economic and social value, released last month, concludes that " defence and the defence industry reaches every corner of the UK and is central to employment in so many cities and towns" but that more can be done to promote its role in promoting the UK's technological future.
But is Britain's military-industrial complex truly in the public interest? Could the 26,000 highly skilled researchers, designers and engineers currently working in the military sector be better deployed elsewhere?
A defence diversification strategy
Jeremy Corbyn has called for a Defence Diversification Agency and has said in the event of non-renewal of Trident that investment would save all the jobs and put people to work in other high-skilled socially-useful industries such as renewable power. Research shows that when evaluated on a cost-per-job basis, jobs in the arms industry are more costly than nearly every other sector. A University of Massachusetts study concluded that, if the US government invested $1 billion in alternative civilian sectors rather than on military production, it would generate up to 140% more jobs; $1 billion military spending was found to create 11,200 jobs whereas education spending creates 26,700 jobs and health spending 17,200 jobs.
A recent report by the Nuclear Education Trust in the UK calls for the development of a defence diversification strategy, something that UK governments have never formally championed. The report does not pretend diversification will come without costs in terms of some jobs losses. But it notes that employment in military manufacturing is anyway falling. The number of jobs in the arms industry is less than a third of the level in 1980 (then over 400,000) - a long-term decline substantially due to the increasingly capital-intensive nature of the work carried out in the UK, automation and globalised supply chains.
By contrast, employment in 'new' industrial sectors is rising and could benefit from a broad arms conversion programme. For example, the German renewable energy industry already employs 380,000 people and this is expected to rise to 600,000 by 2030 as the country increases the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources. Unite, which has persistently called for defence diversification and backs Corbyn's support for defence diversification, notes that legislation is needed to create a statutory duty on the Ministry of Defence and its suppliers to consider diversification. "Without legislation, history tells us that voluntary mechanisms do not work, as defence companies are unwilling to take the risk of entering new or adjacent markets", Unite says.
The UK’s military role in the world and Brexit
If the case for diversification is strong, why have successive UK governments not taken it up? One reason is certainly due to the short-term upheaval in some areas where military industry is important. But there is a more generic issue: the British military-industrial complex is seen by senior military and political figures as an essential part of the UK's military role in the world.
The UK's two new aircraft carriers, being built at a cost of over £6 billion, don't just create British jobs, they will “transform the Royal Navy’s ability to project our influence overseas”, the government has said. Indeed, the plan is for these carriers to deploy “in every ocean around the world over the next five decades”. The new platforms are appearing to take Ministers back to the glory of days of empire in what the Head of the Royal Navy, Admiral Sir Philip Jones, has calleda "new era of British maritime power". To add to their new bases in the Gulf, military chiefs are now also talking about projecting power beyond the Middle East to the Indian Ocean and beyond and considering setting up new bases in South East Asia.
Here is where we come back to promoting UK commercial interests – with the addition of a small matter called Brexit. In a speech to an audience in Washington in 2016, Admiral Jones said: "Now that our Government seeks to extend the UK’s economic partnerships post-Brexit, the Royal Navy stands ready once again to be melded and aligned for best effect with our nation’s growing global ambition". Jones says that to promote UK commercial interests, the Royal Navy must have a "formidable presence on the global stage" especially given Britain's dependence on the sea for imports and exports.
So Brexit is driving UK leaders' new military ambitions. Or perhaps providing an easy cover for their ambitions. Either way, the whole strategy raises concerns. Does this enhanced global military strategy have public support? It is hard to say because it has been so little debated. The public is surely even less likely to support future entanglement in wars in Asia than it does Britain's current wars in the Middle East.
What is clearer is that Britain needs an industrial strategy that makes the economy less dependent on the military and arms exports and which articulates a transition towards creating new, civilian jobs for large numbers of people. But at the same time, Britain surely needs to move away from its imperial pretensions to police the world's oceans. The two factors are likely to be become ever more interlinked in post-Brexit Britain.
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Thursday, September 23, 2021
Racism, climate and divisions top UN agenda as leaders meet
(AP) Racism, the climate crisis and the world’s worsening divisions will take center stage at the United Nations on Wednesday. China’s President Xi Jinping warned that “the world has entered a period of new turbulence and transformation.” Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö said: “We are indeed at a critical juncture.” And Costa Rica’s President Carlos Alvarado Quesada declared: “The future is raising its voice at us: Less military weaponry, more investment in peace!” Speaker after speaker at Tuesday’s opening of the nearly week-long meeting decried the inequalities and deep divisions that have prevented united global action to end the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed nearly 4.6 million lives and is still raging, and the failure to sufficiently tackle the climate crisis threatening the planet. Perhaps the harshest assessment of the current global crisis came from U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who opened his state of the world address sounding an “alarm” that “the world must wake up.” “Our world has never been more threatened or more divided,” he said. “We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes.” “We are on the edge of an abyss—and moving in the wrong direction,” the secretary-general warned.
Shutdowns and Showdowns
(1440) Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are gearing up for a pair of legislative showdowns over the next week and a half, set in motion by two decisions over the past two days. The first focuses on government funding and the debt ceiling. If Congress does not provide funding for fiscal year 2022 by midnight Sept. 30, the federal government will face a shutdown. Similarly, the Treasury Department has said Congress must raise the debt ceiling by mid-October to avoid default. House Democrats passed yesterday a bill pairing short-term funding through Dec. 3 with a debt ceiling increase—a move requiring the support of at least 10 Republican senators. Separately, House Democrats said they planned to bring a $1.2T bipartisan infrastructure deal up for a vote, separate from a $3.5T social spending budget bill. The move pits moderates against progressives, with the latter previously saying they would only support the infrastructure deal if a vote on the budget bill came at the same time. It’s unclear how many House Republicans will support the $1.2T bill.
Haiti Deportations
(Foreign Policy) The United States will continue deportation flights to Haiti today as it seeks to repatriate nearly 15,000 migrants who have crossed into U.S. territory in recent days. Videos of federal authorities mistreating the mostly Haitian migrants at a camp in Del Rio, Texas—a town on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border—has led to fierce criticism from Democratic lawmakers and adds to a warning from the head of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR that the deportations may violate international law. The move could also be seen as hypocritical; just over 7 weeks ago, on Aug. 3, the Biden administration extended protected status to Haitian migrants in the United States, in light of what the Department of Homeland Security called a “deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses” in their home country. The legal authority under which Biden has carried out the expulsion has also been called into question. Title 42, a Trump-era authorization implemented at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic to expel asylum seekers immediately on the grounds that they could spread disease, has been maintained by the Biden administration. Last week, a federal judge blocked the Biden administration from enforcing the policy, a decision that is now being appealed by the U.S. government. Amid a surge of migrants crossing into the United States this year, Title 42 has been applied regularly; figures from U.S. customs authorities show roughly 700,000 expulsions took place under the Biden administration to date, nearly twice the amount that took place under President Donald Trump.
Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
(Reuters) Lithuania’s Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities. Flagship phones sold in Europe by China’s smartphone giant Xiaomi have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuania’s state-run cybersecurity body said on Tuesday. The capability in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software had been turned off for the “European Union region”, but can be turned on remotely at any time, the Defence Ministry’s National Cyber Security Centre said in the report.
Toxic gas, new rivers of molten lava endanger Spanish island
(AP) As a new volcanic vent blew open and unstoppable rivers of molten rock flowed toward the sea, authorities on a Spanish island warned Tuesday that more dangers lie ahead for residents, including earthquakes, lava flows, toxic gases, volcanic ash and acid rain. Several small earthquakes shook the island of La Palma in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa on Tuesday, keeping nerves on edge after a volcanic eruption on Sunday. The rivers of lava, up to six meters (nearly 20 feet) high, rolled down hillsides, burning and crushing everything in their path, as they gradually closed in on the island’s more densely populated coast. Canary Islands government chief Ángel Víctor Torres said “when (the lava) reaches the sea, it will be a critical moment.” The meeting of the lava, whose temperature exceeds 1,000 degrees Celsius (more than 1,800 F), with a body of water could cause explosions and produce clouds of toxic gas. A change in the wind direction blew the ashes from the volcano across a vast area on the western side of the island, with the black particles blanketing everything. Volcanic ash is an irritant for the eyes and lungs. The volcano has also been spewing out between 8,000 and 10,500 tons of sulfur dioxide—which also affects the lungs—every day, the Volcanology Institute said.
Germany’s diversity shows as immigrants run for parliament
(AP) Ana-Maria Trasnea was 13 when she emigrated from Romania because her single, working mother believed she would have a better future in Germany. Now 27, she is running for a seat in parliament. “It was hard in Germany in the beginning,” Trasnea said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But I was ambitious and realized that this was an opportunity for me, so I decided to do whatever I can to get respect and integrate.” Trasnea, who is running for the center-left Social Democrats in Sunday’s election, is one of hundreds of candidates with immigrant roots who are seeking a seat in Germany’s lower house of parliament, or Bundestag. While the number in office still doesn’t reflect their overall percentage of the population, the country’s growing ethnic diversity is increasingly visible in politics. There are about 21.3 million people with migrant backgrounds in Germany, or about 26% of the population of 83 million.
Europe’s defense
(Foreign Policy) EU leaders will discuss plans for a more coordinated defense posture in an upcoming summit in October, European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic told reporters on Tuesday. “I think that after Kabul, after AUKUS, this was, I would say the natural conclusion, that we need to focus more on the strategic autonomy,” Sefcovic said, referring to the recent trilateral defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Kremlin’s party gets 324 of 450 seats in Russian parliament
(AP) Russia’s ruling party will get 324 of the 450 seats in the next national parliament, election authorities announced Tuesday. The number is less than the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, won in the previous election but still an overwhelming majority. Retaining the party’s dominance in the State Duma was widely seen as crucial for the Kremlin ahead of Russia’s presidential election in 2024. President Vladimir Putin’s current term expires that year, and he is expected either to seek reelection or to choose another strategy to stay in power. A parliament the Kremlin can control could be key to both scenarios, analysts and Kremlin critics say. Most opposition politicians were excluded from the parliamentary election that concluded Sunday, which was tainted by numerous reports of violations and voter fraud.
Queued
(WSJ) As of Sunday, there were 73 ships waiting to unload cargo at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a brutal logjam just as holiday cargo hits U.S. shores. There are few options around it, given that last year the ports handled 8.8 million containers, more than double the runner-up port of New York and New Jersey which handled 3.9 million. Oakland and Seattle aren’t big enough to handle the hundreds of thousands of boxes handled in L.A. and Long Beach every week, and while some shippers had been heading to East Coast ports for a while, word about that hack got around rather quickly, and so it’s getting just as bad on the Atlantic, with 20 ships queued at Savannah.
Wednesday’s autumnal equinox
(Washington Post) Summer often seems to last deep into September these days. However, the autumnal equinox—which arrives Wednesday at 3:21 p.m. Eastern time—is a reminder from Mother Nature that fall is finally on our doorstep. We are now seeing just over 12 hours of daylight, having reached the halfway point between our longest and shortest days of the year. The autumnal (or fall) equinox, which usually falls on Sept. 22 or 23, is technically not a day-long astronomical event. It’s a brief moment in time when the sun appears directly over the Earth’s equator before crossing into the Southern Hemisphere. Like the spring equinox in March, the fall equinox is one of only two days each year when most of the Earth experiences about 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. Day and night are nearly equal because we are at a point in our orbit when neither hemisphere is tilted away from or toward the sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox means we are entering the dark season and inching closer toward winter.
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“...I can't sleep without it anymore.”
Hi Alexander...
...A few weeks ago everything just fall to pieces. I thought that was the end for me. I lost everything, my house but most of all my faith.
I bought your Manifestation Magic and in less than a week a lot has changed. I was always in fear what will happen to me and all of a sudden my puzzles pieces are coming back again...
...I'm listening every day and night all my audios and I can't sleep with out it anymore.
With lots of
I can only say WOW for everything you did for me and a change in my lifestyle. Thank you I really appreciate it.
Love
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“Wow so much and amazing things are happening right now it’s just fabulous!!!!”
Hi Alexander
Gosh where do l begin!
Wow so much and amazing things are happening right now it’s just fabulous!!!!
...My destiny is crystal clear and so bright I cannot thank u enough!!!!!
...My destiny is to help women who have been left with children and animals to fend for themselves. I am going to give them a home for the rest of their lives! Huge responsibility but I am up for it
Lots of love
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“I still can’t believe this works.. what magic is this?!”
I’ve been listening to these audios repeatedly for a while now. I’ve been seeing 555, 11:11, 22:22 nothing happened for a while but after about 2 weeks, my sales have gone from 3 figures a month to 4 figures a month and it keeps growing. I still can’t believe this works.. what magic is this?!
Here’s my tip – don’t give up if it doesn’t happen immediately.. set your intentions clearly (very important), keep listening until you see the signs repeatedly, whatever it is you’re trying to manifest – it’s coming. Signs were everywhere for me – especially on my phone and my computer. I just kept seeing it, so I kept listening, putting out positive vibes and it finally happened for me.
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“I am extremely impressed with Manifestation Magic so far, a thoroughly worthwhile investment.”
Having just read the whole of the Quick Start Guide I am highly impressed with the level of detail and clear and precise directions that you have provided. You have demystified so many things that I was not clear about especially with the visualisation which has eluded me up till now. I am actually feeling quite excited that this can work for me and I'm not one to get excited easily! I am extremely impressed with Manifestation Magic so far, a thoroughly worthwhile investment.
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“I use Manifestation Magic exclusively.”
Alexander,
I purchased your program and have been using it every day since. Your programs resonate with me and I will continue to use them.
So, please do not worry.
I purchased two other manifestation programs in the past that do not compare with what you produce. I use Manifestation Magic exclusively.
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“But WHOA these audios are different!!”
I’ve tried lots of other audios before – Brainwave, Subliminals, Hypnosis, you name it I’ve tried them all.. so I was expecting this to be like the same old crap I tried. But WHOA these audios are different!! I feel so energized and confident, I feel like new man! I don’t care much about money but my focus is self-transformation! …It’s weird I am seeing myself become stronger and feel more powerful day after day!
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I am amazed at the result so far! Apart from a shift in consciousness, after I filled in part one of the form and visualized a business class seat for my upcoming UK trip (which I had already booked economy), today in my email box I received a flier from the very carrier I was flying with telling me about their business class deals!"
I've recently started using your program and must admit to having a hefty dose of skepticism before beginning, having tried lots of similar programs in the past. However, after listening as suggested to several of the audios over a few days and beginning to complete the order form, I am amazed at the result so far! Apart from a shift in consciousness, after I filled in part one of the form and visualized a business class seat for my upcoming UK trip (which I had already booked economy), today in my email box I received a flier from the very carrier I was flying with telling me about their business class deals! If that’s not a sign that the universe is listening and putting wheels in motion, I don’t know what is! Very impressed and looking forward to moving in a new direction.
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“A billionaire contacted me within 2 minutes and I sold a camera I literally just posted within 3...WHOA”
Amazing product 😊 I just wanted to say THANK YOU!
A billionaire contacted me within 2 minutes and I sold a camera I literally just posted within 3...WHOA
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deposit into my bank account...”
... The first day, nothing happened...
The second day I got a fillup on gas and $50 cash...
The SECOND time I tried this, I got $135 on the first day…
The THIRD time I tried it a week later, I got $322 unexpected deposit into my bank account…
Yesterday I did it again without even knowing it…woke up to someone calling me to give me $160
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“...I listen to the twilight one every night, all night...”
...I listen to the twilight one every night, all night...
... I seem to be able to deal with whatever is being thrown at me at the moment and deal with it and let it go.
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So, thank you very much for putting these audios together.
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SYMMETRY MAGAZINE 12/19/17 |By Amanda Solliday Planning the next big science machine requires consideration of both the current landscape and the distant future. Around the world, there’s an ecosystem of large particle accelerators where physicists gather to study the most intricate details of matter. These accelerators are engineering marvels. From planning to construction to operation to retirement, their lifespans stretch across decades. But to get the most out of their investments of talent and funding, laboratories planning such huge projects have to think even longer-term: What could these projects become in their next lives? The following examples show how some of the world’s big physics machines have evolved to stay at the forefront of science and technology. Same tunnel, new collisions Before CERN research center in Geneva, Switzerland, had its Large Hadron Collider, it had the Large Electron-Positron Collider. LEP was the largest electron-positron collider ever built, occupying a nearly 17-mile circular tunnel dug beneath the border of Switzerland and France. The tunnel took three years to completely excavate and build. The first particle beam traveled around the LEP circular collider in 1989. Long before then, the international group of CERN physicists and engineers were already thinking about what CERN’s next machine could be. “People were saying, ‘Well, if we do build LEP, then we should make it compatible with the [then-proposed] Large Hadron Collider,’” says James Gillies, a senior communications advisor and member of the strategic planning and evaluation unit at CERN. “If you want to have a future facility, you often have to engage the people who just finished designing one machine to start thinking about the next one.” LEP’s designers chose an energy for the collider that would mass-produce Z bosons, fundamental particles discovered by earlier experiments at CERN. The LHC would be a step up from LEP, reaching higher energies that scientists hoped could produce the Higgs boson. In the 1960s, theorists proposed the Higgs as a way to explain the origin of the mass of elementary particles. And the new machine to look for it could be built in the same 17-mile tunnel excavated for LEP. Engineers began working on the LHC while LEP was still running. The new machine required enlargements to underground areas—it needed bigger detectors and new experimental halls. “That was challenging because these caverns are huge. As they were being excavated, the pressure on the LEP tunnel was reduced and the LEP beamline needed realignment,” Gillies says. “So you constantly had to realign the collider for experiments as you were digging.” After LEP reached its highest energy in 2000, it was switched off. The tunnel remained the same, says Gillies, but there were many other changes. Only one of the LEP detectors, DELPHI, remains underground at CERN as a visitors’ point. In 2012, LHC scientists announced the discovery of the long-sought Higgs boson. The LHC is planned to continue running until at least 2035, gradually increasing the intensity of its particle collisions. The research and development into the accelerator’s successor is already happening. The possibilities include a higher energy LHC, a compact linear collider or an even larger circular collider. High-powered science Decades before the LHC came into existence, a suburb of Chicago was home to the most powerful collider in the world: the Tevatron. A series of accelerators at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory boosted protons and antiprotons to nearly the speed of light. In the final, 4-mile Tevatron ring, the particles reached record energy levels, and more than 1000 superconducting magnets steered them into collisions. Physicists used the Tevatron to make the first direct measurement of the tau neutrino and to discover the top quark, the last observed lepton and quark, respectively, in the Standard Model. The Tevatron shut down in 2011 after the LHC came up to speed, but the rest of Fermilab’s accelerator infrastructure was still hard at work powering research in particle physics—particularly on the abundant, mysterious and difficult-to-detect neutrino. Starting in 1999, a brand-new, 2-mile circular accelerator called the Main Injector was added to the Fermilab complex to increase the number of Tevatron particle collisions tenfold. It was joined in its tunnel by the Recycler, a permanent magnet ring that stored and cooled antiprotons. But before the Main Injector was even completed, scientists had identified a second purpose: producing powerful beams of neutrinos for experiments in Illinois and 500 miles away in Minnesota. By 2005, the proton beam circulating in the Main Injector was doing double duty: sending ever-more-intense beams to the Tevatron collider and smashing into a target to produce neutrinos. Following the shutdown of the Tevatron, the Recycler itself was recycled to increase the proton beam power for neutrino research. “I’m still amazed at how we are able to use the Recycler. It can be difficult to transition if a machine wasn’t originally built for that purpose,” says Ioanis Kourbanis, the head of the Main Injector department at Fermilab. Fermilab’s high-energy neutrino beam is already the most intense in the world, but the laboratory plans to enhance it with future improvements to the Main Injector and the Recycler, and to build a brand-new neutrino beamline. Neutrinos almost never interact with matter, so they can pass straight through the Earth on their way to detectors onsite and others several hundred miles away. Scientists hope to learn more about neutrinos and their possible role in shaping our early universe. The new beamline will be part of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will send neutrinos 800 miles underground to the massive, mile-deep detectors of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Scientists from around the world will use the DUNE data to answer questions about neutrinos, thanks to the repurposed pieces of the Fermilab accelerator complex. A monster accelerator When physicists first came up with the idea to build a two-mile linear accelerator at what is now called SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, managed by Stanford University, they called it "Project M” for “Monster.” Engineers began building it from hand-drawn designs. Once completed, the machine was able to accelerate electrons to near the speed of light, producing its first particle beam in May 1966. The accelerator’s scientific purpose has gone through several iterations of particle physics experiments over the decades, from fixed-target experiments to the Stanford Linear Collider (the only electron-positron linear collider ever built) to an injector for a circular collider, the Positron-Electron Project. These experiments led to the discovery that protons are made of quarks, the first evidence that the charm quark existed (through observations of the J/psi particle, co-discovered with researchers at MIT) and the discovery of the tau lepton. In 2009, the lab used the accelerator as the backbone for a different type of science machine—an X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source. “Looking around, SLAC was the only place in the world with a linear accelerator capable of driving a free-electron laser,” says Claudio Pellegrini, a distinguished professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a visiting scientist and consulting professor at SLAC. Pellegrini first proposed the idea to transform SLAC’s linear accelerator. The new machine, a DOE Office of Science user facility, would be the world’s first laser of its kind that could produce extremely bright hard X-rays, the high-energy X-rays that let scientists take snapshots of atoms and molecules. “Much of the physics and many of the tools learned and developed during the operation of the Stanford Linear Collider were directly applicable to the free electron laser,” says Lia Merminga, head of the accelerator directorate at SLAC. “This was a big factor in the LCLS being commissioned in record time. Without the Stanford Linear Collider experience, this significant body of work would have to be reinvented and reproduced almost from scratch.” Little about the accelerator itself needed to change. But to create a free-electron laser, scientists needed to design a new part: an electron gun, a device that generates electrons to be injected into the accelerator. A collaboration of several national labs and UCLA created a new type of electron gun for LCLS, while other national labs helped build undulators, a series of magnets that would wiggle the electrons to create X-rays. LCLS used only the last third of SLAC’s original linear accelerator. In part of the remaining section, scientists are developing plasma wakefield and other new particle acceleration techniques. For the X-ray laser’s next iteration, LCLS-II, scientists are aiming for an even brighter laser that will fire 1 million pulses per second, allowing them to observe rare and exceptionally transient events. To do this, they will need to replace the original copper structures with superconducting technology. The technology is derived from designs for a large International Linear Collider proposed to be built in Japan. “I’m in awe of the foresight of the original builders of SLAC’s linear accelerator,” Merminga adds. “We’ve been able to do so much with this machine, and the end is not yet in sight.” IMAGE 1....HEADER MACHINE EVOLUTION Courtesy of SLAC IMAGE 2....Large Electron-Positron Collider CERN—Geneva IMAGE 3....Large Hadron Collider CERN IMAGE 4....Tevatron Fermilab—Batavia, Illinois IMAGE 5....Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam Fermilab IMAGE 6....Fixed target & collider experiments SLAC—Menlo Park, California IMAGE 7....Linac Coherent Light Source SLAC
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Charles Band decided to go after the media market in a different way. He was beginning to make a picture called SWORDKILL in 1982, about a samurai who was frozen in ice, when he realized something. “I had watched all these foreign film representatives take my pictures, license my pictures, and basically go to Cannes and Mifed [the two major foreign film markets), rent an office and make sales, and make a huge commission on basically the fruits of my labor. I thought if I was going to have any control at all, I should go to the foreign marketplace and sell my own stuff, especially since over the years my pictures did very well for everyone. They were very commercial.
“I got many letters from French distributors and Japanese distributors, congratulatory letters saying here’s a copy of our advertising campaign as a momento. So I kind of knew some of the players. I decided to take SWORDKILL, which was just about to shoot, and a couple of other pictures, which I was going to make later that year, and hang my shingle in some hotel room in Cannes and actually begin doing it myself.”
Band came up with the name Empire and the company was formed as Empire International, which, with the aid of Band’s promo reel, was also able to raise funds for upcoming, incomplete projects as well as SWORDKILL. In order to pre-sell domestic rights on an independent picture, one needed to guarantee a certain amount of “p and a” or prints and ads expenditure, so Band figured he ought to set up a modest U.S. theatrical distribution organization and begin to distribute these pictures in order to later sell them to the burgeoning U.S. video market.
Parasite (1982) Retrospective
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) Retrospective
Ghoulies (1984) Retrospective
Empire is widely perceived as the new American International Pictures, and you as the new Roger Corman. Is that a fair assessment?
Charles Band: It’s funny, all these categories, independents, mini-majors, B movies, C movies, I don’t know. We can never be like AIP because the times are different. AIP started out making B pictures to fill double bills they were originally the second feature at a drive-in. That whole market is gone, and maybe the analogy here is that much of what we do fits into the video pipeline. Maybe that’s the new market that allows us to cover most of our downside, but I just feel that we’re here to make good movies. There weren’t too many AIP films, or Corman films, that were good movies. There were many of them, and there were some with all sorts of interesting cult appeal . Some launched careers of a few of today’s big stars. But in terms of track record, if you look at both bodies of work of those two distribution-production concerns, there aren’t too many good movies. I hope that by the time we’re into ’87, at least one out of every two or three of our pictures will be considered a well-made film, and that will last 10, 20, 30 years, forever.
In terms of budgets, Empire seems comparable to AIP.
Charles Band: It ‘snot written anywhere that a good picture must cost a ton of money. You don’t have to spend $20 million on a film. We made a small picture last year called Re-Animator. and not only did it get good reviews , but it did well for us as far as its profitability. It’s a picture that cost just about a million dollars, and it had a lot of talent and quality. As we get better, our pictures will get better, and not necessarily more ex- pensive. Our aim is to make real good movies.
What happened with both AIP and Corman is that after they had discovered a talented director or star, they couldn’t hold on to him once the studios offered him work. Can you keep that from happening at Empire?
Charles Band: Not only can we, we are. You can be real smart and draft a contract that commits people for two or three films, but the only thing that’s going to bring people back is how you work together. With a few exceptions, the other independents and studios have a very repressive atmosphere. It’s very tough to get pictures made there, and when they’re in the process of being made, rarely do you get to sit down with the studio head, or anyone who understands pictures, for that matter. Those people who are running the studios, for better or worse, are not filmmakers.
The Alchemist (1983) In 1955, young waitress Lenora (Lucinda Dooling) finds herself inexplicably driving down the California highway to an unknown destination. This doesn’t bode well for Cam (John Sanderford), the hitchhiker she picked up, because he has to endure her somnambulist driving. The duo eventually end up at a graveside in the woods and meet alchemist Aaron (Robert Ginty), who is just as shocked to see them as Lenora appears to be the reincarnation of his wife who was murdered nearly 100 years earlier.
The Alchemist was your first directorial effort, how did that come about?
Charles Band: Well, I wasn’t the director when that film first started. The guy who was responsible for the trailers on VHS was producing the film at the time and after about three days of production, he called me up and said that the current director wasn’t working out and could I parachute in to help finish the film. The original director had shot about 2-3 days of work and I then finished about 6-7 days of shooting. I have no memory of the director.
The late Robert Ginty was the star of The Alchemist and at the time was coming off success with The Exterminator. What was he like to work with and what was his appeal as a leading man?
Charles Band: I had no input in casting Ginty. He was already on board. What I do notice is that with a lot of leading men there is no simpatico in them. Ginty was a very human actor with simpatico and it was sad that he left us so soon. He did come across as an “Everyman” sort of guy.
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Ghost Warrior (1982/1984) a.k.a Swordkill A deep-frozen 400-year-old samurai is shipped to Los Angeles, where he comes back to life. Dazed and confused, he goes on a rampage. Can the female scientist and her colleague who revived him stop him before it’s too late?
Trancers (1984) Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) is a police trooper in the year 2247 who has been hunting down Martin Whistler, a criminal mastermind who uses psychic powers to turn people into mindless “trancers” and carry out his orders. Deth can identify a tranced individual by scanning them with a special bracelet. All trancers appear as normal humans at first, but once triggered, they become savage killers with twisted features.
Before he can be caught, Whistler escapes back in time using a drug-induced time-traveling technique. Whistler’s consciousness leaves his body in 2247 and travels down his ancestral bloodline arriving in 1985 and taking over the body of an ancestor, a Los Angeles police detective named Weisling. Once Deth discovers what Whistler has done, he destroys Whistler’s body—effectively leaving him trapped in the past with no vessel to return to—and chases after him through time the same way. Deth ends up in the body of one of his ancestors: a journalist named Phil Dethton.
With the help of Phil’s girlfriend—a punk rock girl named Leena (Helen Hunt)—Deth goes after Whistler, who has begun to “trance” other victims. Whistler plots to eliminate the future governing council members of Angel City (the future name of Los Angeles), who are being systematically wiped out of existence by Whistler’s murder spree of their own ancestors. Deth arrives too late to prevent most of the murders and can only safeguard Hap Ashby (Biff Manard), a washed-up former pro baseball player, who is the ancestor of the last surviving council member, Chairman Ashe (Anne Seymour).
Deth is given some high-tech equipment, which is sent to him in the past: his sidearm (which contains two hidden vials of time drugs to send him and Whistler back to the future), and a “long-second” wristwatch, which temporarily slows time, stretching one second to ten. The watch has only enough power for one use, but he later receives another watch to pull the same trick again.
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During the end fight with Whistler, one of the drug vials in Jack’s gun breaks, leaving only one vial to get home. Jack is forced to make a choice: kill the innocent Weisling (who is possessed by the evil Whistler), or use the vial to send Whistler back to 2247, which would strand Jack in the present. Jack chooses to inject Weisling with the vial, saving the lieutenant’s life but condemning Whistler to an eternity without a body to return to. Jack then decides to remain with Leena in 1985, although observing him from the shadows is McNulty, his boss from the future, who has traveled down his own ancestral line, ending up in the body of a young girl.
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Interview with actor Tim Thomerson
Tell us about this journey of Jack Deth.
Tim Thomerson: I got this role as a character named Rogue in Metalstorm (1983), and we started working, and that was my first time working with Charlie Band. I had a lot of fun with it, Charlie was fun to work with, and kind of left me alone, which I like. I don’t like a lot of direction. We had quite a lot of fun doing it and then this idea for TRANCERS came up. This is still Empire now, so fast forward to late 1984 early 1985. The FUTURE COP was the original title for TRANCERS, so I went to Danny (Bilson) and Paul (De Meo), and we had meetings together. They were fans of these Philip Marlowe type detective guys, so we were all in love with that genre, and I always liked Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart, just a fan of that particular character. Charlie wanted to do this cop that comes from the future in LA today, meaning from the year, 20-something. So Charlie didn’t really care what we did with the character from what I remember, so Danny and Paul wrote up this guy Jack and so that’s how that was born. When the character transformed into the other body that was named Philip, it’s a tribute to Marlowe. That was Danny and Paul’s idea, to write it up like that, and for there to be some kind of dialogue and kind of the crispy kind of way of saying. You’ve seen that movie right?
Many, many times.
Tim Thomerson: Yeah, so for what it is and for the time that it was shot, it’s a pretty classic B movie I think.
The opening of the film is great, the cross between the future and the past and that noir-like feeling is easy to get on board with.
Tim Thomerson: I think it really had its own feeling about it. I thought that while we were shooting it, even though it’s a silly ass movie. But it just had a feeling, you know? Charlie was great to work with on set, and was funny, had a winning personality, and Helen was just a hilarious girl. She really is a funny chick. The performances were really good too; you can tell they got along.
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The Dungeonmaster (1984) Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron) is a skilled computer programmer who lives with his girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing), and “X-CaliBR8,” a quasi-sentient personal computer that Paul programmed and which he interacts with via a neural interface. Gwen is jealous of Paul’s unusually close relationship with X-CaliBR8, to whom Paul has given a female voice, and fears that their relationship will be destroyed by Paul’s reliance on X-CaliBR8 for his various day-to-day activities. One night, Paul and Gwen are both transported to a Hellish realm presided over by Mestema (Richard Moll), an ancient, demonic sorcerer who has spent millennia seeking a worthy opponent with whom to do battle. Having long defeated his enemies with magic, Mestema has become intrigued with technology, and wishes to pit his skills against Paul’s, with the winner claiming Gwen. Arming Paul with a portable version of X-CaliBR8 (which takes the form of a computerized wrist band), Mestema begins transporting Paul into a variety of scenarios in which he must defeat various opponents. Most of the challenges involve Paul using his X-CaliBR8 wristband to shoot people, monsters, and objects with laser beams. After Paul completes Mestema’s various challenges, the two engage in a final battle, which takes the form of a fist fight in which Paul kills Mestema by throwing him into a pit of lava. After Mestema dies, Paul and Gwen are transported back to their house, where Gwen expresses her acceptance of X-CaliBR8 and suggests that she and Paul get married.
David Allen on the stop-motion for the “Stone Canyon Giant”
David Allen first became involved in directing an episode of Charles Band’s DUNGEONMASTER almost two years ago, as a test for working with Band on THE PRIMEVALS, a property they have in development together. Although Band had already directed his segment of the film, no clear story had been worked out. The film had been sold on the basis of its premise-a showcase of effects sequences-and it had to be delivered quickly. Band suggested doing a sequence which featured a large statue brought to life (as in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS), and Allen agreed.
Allen spent two days on location, shooting mostly in continuity without storyboards, then three weeks, off-and-on, in the studio to do the effects. According to Allen, the finished segment is “heavily footnoted with explanations for why it didn’t turn out better. We’d do something and think it was okay and then get the shot back from the lab-but we’d already be working on a new shot. A couple of shots are okay, but there are so many below-par scenes. I wanted to go back on location almost a year after the original shooting and redo the first shot of the statue in Dynamation-a split-screen effect all on the original negative. A good first shot would have better set the stage.”
Allen would also have liked a chance to introduce the statue “more poetically, with music,” but he never had an opportunity to speak with the film’s composer, Richard Band. “A pause for mood and atmosphere would have given the sequence some intelligence, but in the time allotted I didn’t think of it.”
Besides doing animation for his own segment, Allen provided two effects for other sequences of the film: for an exploding car, Allen took an explosion he had photographed years ago and superimposed it on the shot, for the conclusion of the film he provided a shot of the evil magician falling into a lava pit. “Band came up with that at the last minute–the film was written as it went along. I did it for a few hundred dollars, using a six-inch doll, some old cliffs I’d used long ago, and oatmeal. I didn’t think it would work, but with all the fire and smoke I put in there it came out, maybe not wonderful, but credible.”
Although dissatisfied with the final result, Allen nevertheless enjoyed the experience. “I learned a lot,” he said. “I got the camera where it needed to be. I enjoyed getting everything done in two days. I was scouting locations sometimes only twenty minutes ahead of the camera crew.”
Interview with Jeffrey (Paul) Byron
This was your second adventure with Band’s band; were you excited to be back in the B-movie saddle?
Jeffrey Byron: Sure! I had a great time on METALSTORM and every actor likes to work. So doing a second movie right afterwards was great.
Seven chapters and seven directors
Jeffrey Byron: Indeed. It was il fun and unique experience and was ahead of its time. It was a clever idea. It was like doing se ven separate films, which was very cool.
What was your favorite segment and why?
Jeffrey Byron: That’s easy! The one that I wrote (SLASHER) about the serial killer. My older brother Steve Stafford directed it, and I was able to hire some close actor friends to be in it. It was a blast! Being directed by my brother Steve was a great experience. He is a talented filmmaker and in some respects this segment inspired him to get more and more directing jobs Plus I got to hire some great actor friends to be in the segment I wrote. That was gratifying as well.
Do you have insight or back story as to the name change?
Jeffrey Byron: I don’t recall how that happened. That was up to Charlie Band. He was a wiz at that kind of stuff. He came up with all the rates. I assume he changed the title because he got more traction with THE DUNGEONMASTER, because of the popularity of DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS
As in METALSTORM, you had to square off against Richard Moll, but this time as an ancient demon. Was he a more worthy nemesis this time round?
Jeffrey Byron: Richard and I got to know each other on METALSTORM, so we had a warmer rapport on the second film. We had a perfectly good relationship on the first film, but we knew each other better by the time we did this film and he was a pro so it was a great experience
Any RAGEWAR trivia or lesser known facts you can share with us?
Jeffrey Byron: All the scenes that were shot in my characters apartment..were actually shot in any actual apartment!
What was next for you after THE DUNGEON MASTER?
Jeffrey Byron: Quite soon after I jumped into the soap opera world. They had been chasing me down for awhile and I finally agreed to do ONE LIFE TO LIVE. After I left that show. I went on to do ALL MY CHILDREN, THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and finally PORT CHARLES. I did other work in between but the soaps were my bread and butter.
The Dungeonmaster was a try-out of several different directors.
Charles Band: “It was a fun idea. I’ve always done things a little differently and we had a number of directors at the time who all wanted to direct features. We were getting pretty prolific and it was exactly that. I think there were seven directors, if I’m not mistaken. There were more that we were actually looking at but seven wound up directing seven little chapters in this Dungeonmaster film. I would have to think real hard to remember who directed what, but that’s what happens. We made a strange little film.
“It’s actually a fun film to watch. Part of what low-budget films suffer from is you usually are relegated to one location because that’s all you can afford. Unless you are really adept at story-telling and casting, you need to make these movies much more character-driven. Dungeonmaster’s one of those films which diverts you with seven or eight different environments. If nothing else, it certainly looks colorful! It made a great trailer, that’s for sure.”
Savage Island (1985) Women who have been captured and sold as slave labor to a South American emerald mine hatch a plan for revolution and revenge.
Empire seems very loyal to its people given a few pictures, everybody gets to direct. Is that a deliberate policy?
Charles Band: Definitely. It’s rare that talent is Just born overnight. It takes time and it’s crazy for a big company to gamble with its resources on a new director. If it turns out wrong, it makes no sense going and spending the time. It makes more sense to educate people here and pay for the tuition, so to speak. Some turn out to be wonderful and some take more time. I can’t think of one that we’ve worked with so far that hasn’t picked up the Empire banner and shown promise.
People like Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon, and other directors who have had good experiences with us and are now making their second or third film with us this year, find that our whole directive here is making movies. That’s where all our energy goes. We’re passionate about making movies. That makes their lives much easier because we can work well together. David Schmoeller just finished a picture for us called Crawlspace that turned out very well, and he has had several offers to go elsewhere to make pictures. Well, he has turned them down to make two more pictures back to back for us. I don’t know if the offers were for substantially more than what we’re paying him, I Just know that the experience on Crawlspace was real good for all of us. and good for him creatively. Once a script is approved and we know what we’re spending on a picture, we give the directors total free reign to make their movie.
Re-Animator (1985) Retrospective
Zone Troopers (1985) In Italy in World War II, four members, led by their grizzled sergeant (Tim Thomerson), of an American military patrol are lost behind enemy lines. They discovers an alien spaceship that has crash-landed in the woods, along with its crew. The alien pilot is dead, and one of the aliens has been captured by the Nazis, hampering efforts of the aliens to return home. A larger Nazi unit, with scientific and medical personnel, also investigate the crash and seek to capture the alien’s technology and use that to win the war. However, the aliens side with the Americans after the Nazi’s actions to their crewmember.
Another popular title was Zone Troopers. How did that come about and where did the concept come up?
Charles Band: Well, I had Danny Bilson and Paul Le Meo, who wrote Trancers and the stars of that film Tim Thomerson and Art La Fleur on board. I also had a wonderful Production Designer and Art Director and it also gave me an opportunity to go back to Italy as I grew up there. Some people don’t realize that the likes of Crawlspace and Troll were, along with Zone Troopers, filmed in Italy rather than the USA. It was a great set-up for about three years as we got some good films made, but then things changed and the dollar and lira value changed, so it became difficult to continue to film there, but we are very proud of those films.
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Zone Troopers was also directed by Danny Bilson, who had an interesting time of it. “We had a German army of Italian-speaking extras,” Bilson recalls. “We had to have these Nazi SS troops come across a meadow, and they looked like Girl Scouts. Trying to be Mr. Director, I went to show them how to do it. We’ve all played army when we were little kids, and you know how to do it, but when I was right in the middle of showing them, I slipped into this big pile of cow slop. Paul (De Meo) cried out helpfully, ‘But do you want them to fall in the cow shit?”’
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“We had a lot of fun with the Italian prop men,” De Meo chimes in, “One of them came up to us and asked where he should put these two bottles of gin. We wondered what the bottles of gin were for and started looking through the script, thinking that maybe we forgot something. It turned out that somewhere in the script was a description that said two GIs are playing gin. Another time, a prop man bought a pineapple because he didn’t know that was a‘40’s term for a grenade.”
Bilson is very happy working for Empire. He calls it a secure environment that constantly provides an opportunity to work. He feels that the experience he and others are gaining will build confidence and lead to better-made films. Paul De Meo compares the working atmosphere with “almost being like working at Warner’s in the ’50’s. There are lots of people making lots of movies In all kinds of genres.” Bilson Is particularly proud of the fact that he’s been able to work in low-budget, exploitation films without “ever having to do a women-in-prison film or a slasher movie nothing I would find morally objectionable. That’s just not our meat-and-potatoes.”
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Do your writers come up with concepts?
Charles Band: Most, if not all. of our projects come from my titles and concepts. That’s a reward for me, to get to dream things up and then assign various projects and concepts to writers and see the picture get made and distributed. So, it’s a little different than the way other people work where they have 200 script submissions a week and they hope to find one and develop it. We’re lucky enough not to be looking for any projects. If anything good comes along, we’re here to read it. We still have our hundred script submissions, but basically, we’re Just looking for good writers. Very few of our projects Just walk in the door perhaps one in the last year. We have hundreds of concepts we’ve been developing over the last few years, and those are the ideas that will become movies.
It sometimes seems that the lack of control works out well when you have a Stuart Gordon around, but there are some films Eliminators comes immediately to mind that needed somebody to step in and say, “This isn’t working.” That script Just didn’t seem ready.
Charles Band: True, but that’s the script’s fault, not the director’s. It’s impossible to predict how a project is going to turn out. You can do all the right things and it Just doesn’t work. On the other hand, you can make 500 mistakes and suddenly the picture works. You want to make sure you have the best script possible, but sometimes things are rushed, and that shows. It always comes down to the script. Sometimes the script reads real well but it Just doesn’t play that way. Eliminators was one of the best scripts we’ve ever had here. It reads great. Why the script reads so well and the picture isn’t so good to some, the picture is fun and works; to others, it’s disjointed if you read the script, you’ll find a really well-written, fun script, very cohesive, very weird. I have no defense, or no explanation for why some pictures work and some don’t. The best we can do is to make certain we start off with a good script and that the talent we assemble is right, then hope for the best. You just don’t know. You don’t even know when you see the dailies. There are some times when you see the dailies and you’re in love with every shot, and it gets put together and it just doesn’t work.
Trancers was one of the best things Empire has done and I was surprised it didn’t do better.
Charles Band: So was I. It was one I directed, so I was anxious to see it work. But it was the least effective of all the first year’s pictures. That’s another sad thing: There’s no telling which picture is going to work.
Was it supposed to be the first in a series?
Charles Band: Yes. I always wanted to make an inexpensive series, not something that would cost tons of money and be hard to get off the ground. We could have made two of those movies a year. I love the character of Jack Deth and the whole thing would have been fun to do. We were even close to doing another one in spite of the first’s failure, just because ‘why not?’ But we’ll come up with something else someday. Tim Thomerson’s a major talent and no one’s used him right except us in Trancers .
Paul De Meo and Danny Bilson have written another film that will begin production soon, Journeys Through The Darkzone (1986). Bilson will direct. “It’s about these guys who work on a dumping fishing station where people get their anxieties out through recreation,” Bilson reveals. Then people start disappearing from this colony on this water planet. It’s a little like Outland. An investigation leads to this attraction, which is an alien machine which can project you into an alternate reality to satisfy your fantasies. But it has hidden dangers.”
The pair are currently scripting Arena (1989), which they describe as Body and Soul in space. Arena is based around a fantasy sport and involves a bid for a new champion, racketeering and space gangsters.
The Caller (1987) One night, an unusual stranger in need asks a woman living alone in a house in the woods if he can use her phone. It soon becomes clear that they’re playing a strange mind game and that there’s something very wrong about the woods.
The History of Empire Films Part Two Charles Band decided to go after the media market in a different way. He was beginning to make a picture called SWORDKILL in 1982, about a samurai who was frozen in ice, when he realized something.
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Scarab #2
This looks like the original cover to a Philip K. Dick book where you just knew the editor and publisher had no idea what was happening so they commissioned some artist to just paint some "crazy fantasy shit."
Boredom warning: the protagonist of this comic book is still a super old guy.
Eleanor isn't dead like everybody who read the first issue believed by the end of it. That means about ten people were surprised when they picked up Issue #2 of this series. Logically, I know more than ten people purchased Scarab #2. But if we lived in a world where comic book readers didn't just constantly shrug their shoulders and keep buying every issue of a series simply because they picked up the first issue and actually limited their purchases to comic books that had an entertaining previous issue, my estimate would probably be pretty close to the mark.
Louis has brought Eleanor back into the Labyrinth of Doors to keep her alive because time doesn't work there. I mean, it does work there because people can move around there and movement is a symptom of time. Symptom might be the wrong word but when have I ever cared about my word choices? You either have time or you have stasis. You can't have both! Unless you live in the Phantom Zone and then I don't know what the fuck is going on. Sometimes kids grow up there and other times dogs roam billions of miles unchanged to find their stupid boy. If Louis wanted to be more accurate, he'd point out that life functions seem to slow down to imperceptibility inside the Labyrinth of Doors. If Eleanor seems like she didn't age for fifty years while living there previously, she probably won't bleed out until he can figure out how to work Scarab's super life saving powers on Eleanor, the way he used them after he was thrown out of a second floor window and became an undulating sack of blood and broken bones that somehow wormed his way up two flights of stairs and opened the bottom drawer of a dresser (which is the biggest impossibility. Go lie on your stomach on the floor right now and try to open your dresser drawer. If you were successful, now go belly flop off the roof of the house and try again, smart ass).
Louis admits that Eleanor's soul has left her body so he's really just taking care of a naked empty vessel. The naked part is the most important part of Eleanor's current description. Why else would he want to prolong his grief when he knows she's dead? Now this pervert just gets his kicks off bathing her every twenty minutes.
See? He admits it.
The Phantom Stranger arrives because why not. A writer has to throw something into this thing to attract buyers. Fans of The Phantom Stranger would have been all over this comic book when they saw him on the cover, probably doubling the amount of people who purchased it. Yes, I'm saying there are only ten Phantom Stranger fans.
The Phantom Stranger really is a genius idea for a comic book character. If you call your character a stranger that means you can't divulge too much about that character lest they stop being a stranger. Which means you don't actually have to do any real work building the character, or giving the character motivation, or making any kind of sense at all! You can just have him poke his nose into other people's business every now and...um...help? Maybe not help? Maybe just judge. I don't really know what he does because he's been written so well over the years! I wish I could write a character this popular without ever giving it any defining characteristics or motivation. Oh, excuse me, I suppose The Phantom Stranger does have some defining characteristics. I forgot about the fedora and the trench coat.
Meanwhile, a beam of light that used to be somebody (Eleanor? The Sicari?) flies through God's eye, circles Hell, and winds up coming its brains out in the Internet. I don't know how sexually exciting the Internet was in 1993. It was mostly just AOL chat rooms, bank account draining Neverwinter Nights, and Star Trek bulletin boards. Okay fine. I admit it. Just typing that gave me a boner.
Once DC's Vertigo line was fully up and running with a few major titles leading the way and proclaiming, "This is what Vertigo is!", other titles with newer writers came along and all produced exactly the kind of shit that Vertigo apparently was. I don't know if I can fully articulate what that was, sort of a mash-up of Milligan's weirdness and sensitivity from Shade the Changing Man combined with the stark, metaphysical horrors of Moore's Swamp Thing and the shitty, grim reality and politics of Delano's Hellblazer with a sprinkling of the intellectual topsy-turvy re-tellings of mythic unreality of Gaiman's Sandman. But even unable to really describe it, I fucking know when I read something written to be a Vertigo title rather than written to be a story worthy of being a Vertigo title.
This might as well be a Polaroid of writer John Smith wanking himself off.
The early nineties were full of these kinds of Vertigo titles that just strung together words and phrases trying to invoke some kind of profound weirdness. Even the previous series I discussed, Milligan's The Extremist, came off as one of these books that was just putting on the clothing of Vertigo to make it seem more important. But at least The Extremist used the weird and outlandishly adult story to portray flawed humans considering their lives and how they got to where they were and what the fuck do they do now? There were some really bleak and gut-wrenching moments in The Extremist that I truly loved even if the plot didn't matter much to me. But it was the plot that pulled and pushed the characters to those moments, so who am I to complain? Also there were plenty of titties.
I know, I know! All you high-falutin' comic book nerds don't read comic books to get boners like I do! Well la dee da! Just remember that I'm not judging you for getting your kicks by sticking your genitals in Blue Bonnet ice cream and putting it back in the display case.
Um, anyway, this comic book still has a lot of space so I'm not giving up on it providing me with great moments. And since my tone in this commentary says I'm casually beating the shit out of Smith's writing," I should probably show something I sort of liked. The Phantom Stranger has touched Louis's head to make him relive some of his memories as Scarab. And while it's an easy way to present a bunch of "weird" story fragments that John Smith doesn't have to expound on, I still like this one:
The Non-Certified Spouse tells me "Weltschmerz" means, literally translated, "world pain."
On the left hand, this is just more of that "here's some weird stuff to stick into this magazine to make it Vertigo!" But on the right hand, I'd love for this to actually be a story that Smith thought out and formed into a coherent, deep, and touching two to four issue arc. Maybe Smith jotted it down and thought, "That's really all that needs to be said about that." But isn't that also how pitches start? This is a pitch. The story that could grow from this could be tragic and heartbreaking with all the nihilistic elements to ultimately provide evidence of the uplifting and hopeful nature of mankind. I think maybe this one panel should have been the pitch for Scarab.
Some more of Louis's memories ("Frozen in ice on the dark side of the moon, summoning the Breathing Trees for help" and "Teaming up with Sargon the Sorcerer against the dreaded double menace of Doktor Vortex and The Quote") help establish that the Scarab had weird adventures that, while extruding the essence of Vertigo phrases, also helps ground the Scarab in the Golden Age. Because that's weird shit that you can absolutely see on the cover of comics with huge price tags hanging on the wall behind the counter of any local comic book shop. No difference exists between the two scenarios I just quoted and Batman and Robin battling "The man who saw with his fingers!" Smith is definitely evoking the Golden Age here. And, of course, Vertigo because that Auschwitz thing.
Look at me! Reading into and explicating the evidence of the text when I could have just kept reading ahead and had John Smith say it to me plainly.
The Phantom Stranger tells Louis he needs to become the Scarab again because "the world skin is diseased" and "the wheels of chance are turning too fast" and "disorder corrupts the physical plane." But then when Louis is all, "So that's why all this shit is happening!", The Phantom Stranger says, "Well, I mean, it's hard to tell for sure. But, you know, maybe somebody sent the Sicari. It's a possibility. But then, maybe not. Who knows? But just do what I say, just in case! I'm sure if Madame Xanadu were here, she'd totally agree with me."
Meanwhile, the light that actually is Eleanor isn't in the Internet at all. When it said it had entered "the Net" while orgasming harder than it's ever orgasmed before (take that, Louis!), I simply assumed Smith was being all cutting edge in 1993. But he just meant the "net of life" or whatever. She's just connected to everything now. That's probably a better path for this story since the Internet wouldn't get interesting for another year when Geocities came along and The X-Files fan pages started to proliferate like cancer cells.
Louis's only desire is to find Eleanor again so if becoming Scarab can help do that, he'll take it back and maybe he'll get around to saving the world too. The Phantom Stranger just remains silent because that's what he does best. As if he knows anything! He's totally acting like he knows stuff by not saying stuff but really looking like he knows that stuff while he really don't know any of that stuff. Like knows like, my man, and I see you!
The Phantom Stranger leaves and Louis asks the scarabaeus (that's the thing that turns him into the Scarab which I also probably spelled incorrectly) to make him young again and it works! Issue #3 is going to be more exciting simply because the protagonist isn't an old man anymore! Me and six other people can't wait for it!
Scarab #3 Rating: B. Enh, it wasn't so bad! Sure, I had plenty to criticize. But in the end, it's a story about mortality and longing for the expansive freedom and possibility that fall further and further into a person's past until all they have left is the end of fatigue promised by death! I can totally relate to this shit.
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